Guy Fleming jackets

Who was, or is, Guy Fleming? He's not mentioned in Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger's By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design, nor does there appear to be a tribute site or any other information of significance on the web. (Update: there is now, at https://www.guyflemingart.net/) I've found a scattering of listings for books that credit him as a designer or illustrator, but other than that all I know is that between 1970 and 1979 he designed this quartet of jackets for Harper & Row (back when there was still a Harper & Row and not whatever its pathetic Rupert Murdoch-owned successor is called these days). (See comments section for an update.)

For most readers of my generation, the more familiar cover for One Hundred Years of Solitude was the old Avon or Bard version, which at least in my copy does not credit the designer. Fleming's cover is quite good, though; notice the boat being enveloped by the jungle, which is of course straight out of the book. The bottom pair of jackets are certainly eye-catching (which is what a book jacket needs to be, after all) but the one for Eréndira is maybe a little too busy.

The best of the lot in my opinion is the cover for The Autumn of the Patriarch. The detailing is actually quite intricate, but the overall layout is very simple and the lettering stands out effectively against the dark background. (I assume, without knowing, that the lettering was done by hand.) Notice that the building and the backlit window are a few degrees off perpendicular, which gives the impression that the whole thing is sinking.

My copy was purchased in 1976 in the old Barnes & Noble Sale Annex at 5th Avenue and 18th Street, opposite the flagship store that still operates. At the time, the store had a policy (fairly unheard of back then) of discounting the New York Times bestseller list 40%. I waited until the book hit the list, and then plunked down my $6.00. Compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude, though, it was a bit of a laborious read, and I've never re-read it.

Update: In the course of the '70s Fleming apparently created the jackets for at least two other García Márquez books, Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel. I haven't found a usable image of the latter yet, but here is Leaf Storm:

Update (2025): There is now a website (link) dedicated to Fleming's work.

Notebook

At one time during his adolescence he spent endless hours flipping through LPs in the local record stores, riffling through the bargain bins — 99¢, 49¢ — searching for an album that he knew in all likelihood didn't exist. He went on looking for it nevertheless, stubbornly believing, against all evidence, that his search was bound to be rewarded for the simple reason that he had himself dreamed it into being. Maybe it hadn't literally been a dream — he was already no longer sure — maybe just a vision, or maybe he had simply conjured it up out of whole cloth because he so badly wanted it to exist. He only knew that if he ever found the album he would recognize it, and that in some obscure way that record was the key, the opening to a kind of revelation that would instantly change everything, that would grant him direction, grant him wisdom, that would let him soar away from the distinctly unexceptional life he was living into a kind of infinite paradise of meaning and richness.

Sometimes he thought he knew, or half-knew, what the record was. It had to involve lyrics, of course; there had to be songs on the album. Instrumental music, classical or jazz, though he enjoyed them well enough, would not do. There had to be words that would make perfect, orderly, rational sense, even as the chords would be the richest and the melodies the most delicate and thrilling that had ever been composed. As he imagined it at various times, it might take the form of a nearly forgotten early Dylan album (which turned out never to have been recorded), or a rumored bootleg available only to those who knew where to ask, or a half-remembered Georges Moustaki disque a friend had played him once and which his ignorance of French prevented him from understanding, or a Pentangle record he had heard behind the background chatter at a party. But always, when he found them, assuming there really were LPs that fit those descriptions, their promise soon evaporated on closer inspection. They weren't bad records, necessarily — in fact some of them he became quite fond of, for a time — but they were unmistakably not what he was looking for.

Once or twice he flattered himself that the vision had been given to him because the album was in fact his to record. His musical skills were modest at best — actually they were almost negligible — but he was young, perhaps with time … But no, in the end he knew that his act of creation was destined to consist purely of having imagined the record's existence; his vindication would be its discovery. He faithfully anticipated the day when he would at last find the record and buy it, his hands trembling a little as the clerk handed him the bag, and would rush it home at once, break off the plastic wrap, and unfold the cardboard sleeves. There would be two discs, each in its own white paper liner, and as the black vinyl of the first began to rotate steadily at 33⅓ revolutions per minute he would drop the stylus into the groove. The first strains of music would emerge into the room and he would sit there and begin reading the lyrics (printed in white on a black, starry background, because night and space are the deepest mysteries of all), and instantly, effortlessly, everything would be revealed.

Eventually they stopped making LPs. The record stores he had haunted were replaced by discount chains, then they all disappeared. He accommodated himself to CDs, and after a while no longer listened much to vinyl. A shadow of the vision remained in his memory, but the record was by now forever beyond his grasp, annihilated or never born.

Notebook

Wraiths

Many years ago, when I was a kid, I remember someone demonstrating how you could catch a frog by peeling off the red cellophane strip from a pack of cigarettes, attaching it to a hook, and dangling it in front of the amphibian's nose. Unlike fish, who could often be fussy about what a lure looked like and whether it resembled what they're accustomed to eating, the frog didn't seem to care that the cellophane didn't look in the least like an insect or anything else that might be regarded as suitable prey; it responded only to motion, instinctively and without discrimination. It's worked for 200 million years, so why complicate things?

What the frog appeared to lack was an idea of its prey. Does, on the other hand, the motionless heron in the marsh, waiting for a fish — or our hapless frog — to swim within range of its beak, have such an idea, a mental image of what it has caught before and may expect to see again? I'm not up on the research on animal minds, but I'd be surprised if it didn't. And anyone who thinks that a dog, waiting in a silent house at the end of an afternoon, is less capable of not just expecting but imagining its owner's imminent arrival than the man now driving home is able to envision the dog waiting behind the door, can't have spent much time around dogs.

But it doesn't matter where we draw the line in our ancestral journey up from mindless invertebrate wriggling, whether at the birth of the first mammal or the first primate or at Lascaux. The inescapable fact is that at some point along the way we became capable of experiencing in our minds things that are not there. And the moment we can form an image of something, whether in pictures or sounds or ideas, we enter a world of ghosts, because an image, by definition, is separate from the thing it represents and takes on a life of its own.

Like most people, I regularly communicate with people whom I have never seen or even spoken to. Technology has made this faster and more pervasive, but in essence the phenomenon dates back to the birth of writing. A scribe picked up a stylus and incised a row of signs in a tablet of clay, and the signs escaped him and bore away their signals to be read by others in another city or another time, even long after the cities had fallen into ruins and the scribe's language had vanished from the tongues of men.

As Derrida famously showed, even spoken language itself is, in essence, another form of writing, of inscription, not the other way around. Like writing, our spoken words — even our imagined words — are no more than the trace of a presence whose own existence is hypothetical except as revealed in its trace. But I'm not really all that interested in the philosophical problems this raises, as provocative (and unresolvable) as they are.

What does interest me is the psychological landscape that such a discovery supposes. Because we are conscious and capable of imagining things that are not immediately present, we live among memories, fantasies, anticipations, fictions, conversations recollected and imagined. We draw distinctions, naturally, between what is real and what we only imagine, but the border turns out to be surprisingly permeable. We can, for instance, be moved to tears or laughter by a movie knowing full well that we are only witnessing flickering patterns of light, shadow, and sound, knowing that the actors are not who they pretend to be, that they may be dead or may even, in the case of animation and computer graphics, have never drawn a breath at all.

And what of those who are real (or were) but whom we imagine when they are not there, whom we perhaps imagine, at times, as they are not and have never been? What ghost world do they enter, the moment they step out of sight?

Mantis

Today on my way back to work from picking up lunch I spotted a large praying mantis on the sidewalk. The mantis seemed sound in body but I wasn't sure how long she'd stay that way if she remained where she was, so I gently urged her from behind until she had climbed up onto a wall into at least temporary safety. I could have captured her and brought her home, but what do I know of where a mantis wants to be?

As far as the mantis was concerned, my prodding, a signal from an alien and inconceivable world, was nothing more than a stimulus producing an enforced response. The mantis climbed, and within whatever rudimentary form of consciousness it possesses no trace of me remained.

Mantises are not common — though probably not as uncommon as one would think, being well-camouflaged — and I doubt that I see even one a year. Though they probably play some small ecological role, eating and being eaten, I suspect it would be scarcely noticed if one day they simply vanished. How many other small things have gone, and no one the wiser? But against that gray, depleted eventuality the mantis climbed the wall, vigorous but unhurried, and one of us walked away altered by the encounter.

Something — anything — that is not only this moment.

After lunch (Julio Cortázar)

(As far as I can tell, there has never been an official English-language version of this story, which originally appeared in Final del juego in 1956 as “Después del almuerzo.” I've always had a soft spot for the piece, and the absence of a translation is a little mystifying, given Cortázar's reputation, but such are the whims of the publishing business. My translation below has, as they say, “the merit of existing”; I will gladly remove it at the request of the copyright holder. I have chosen to refer to the narrator's unnamed companion as “him,” although it could just as readily have been “it.”)

After lunch I would have preferred to stay in my room reading, but almost immediately Papa and Mama came to tell me that I had to take him for a walk that afternoon.

At first I said no, let someone else take him, please let me study in my room. I would have said more, would have explained why I didn't like having to take him out, but Papa took a step forward and started looking at me in that way I just can't resist, fixing his eyes on me so that I can feel them penetrating deeper and deeper into my face, until I'm ready to scream and I have to turn around and say yes, of course, right away. At such times Mama doesn't say anything and doesn't even look at me. She just stands back a little bit with her hands clasped together, and when I see her gray hair falling over her forehead I have to turn around and say yes, of course, right away. So then they went away without another word and I started getting dressed, my only consolation being that I could break in a pair of yellow shoes that shined and shined.

When I left my room it was two o'clock, and Aunt Encarnación said that I should look for him in the back room, which is where he always likes to settle himself in the afternoon. Aunt Encarnación must have noticed how miserable I was about having to take him out, because she ran her hand over my hair and then leaned down and gave me a kiss on the forehead. I felt her slip something into my pocket.

“So you can buy something,” she said. “And don't forget to give him a little, it's better that way.”

I kissed her on the cheek, feeling a little better, and walked past the living room door where Papa and Mama were playing checkers. I think I said see you later, something like that, and then I reached into my pocket for the five peso note, smoothed it out, and tucked it into my wallet where I already had a one peso bill and some change.

I found him in a corner of the back room and grabbed hold of him the best I could. We went out through the patio to the gate into the front yard. Once or twice I was tempted to let go of him, to go back inside and tell Papa and Mama that he didn't want to come with me, but I was sure that in the end they would bring him along and make me go with him to the front door. They had never asked me to take him downtown — it wasn't fair to ask me to do that because they knew perfectly well that the only time they had made me take him for a walk on the sidewalk that horrible thing with the Alvarez's cat had happened. I could still see the face of the cop talking with Papa in the doorway, and then Papa serving two glasses of rum, and Mama crying in her room. It just wasn't fair for them to ask me.

It had rained that morning and the sidewalks of Buenos Aires were even more of a mess than usual; you could hardly walk without getting your feet soaked in a puddle. I did what I could to walk on the dry parts and not get my new shoes wet, but right away I saw that he actually liked going into the water, and I had to tug with all my strength to keep him at my side. In spite of this he managed to get to a spot where there was one stone that was sunk deeper than the rest, and by the time I caught on he was completely soaked and had dead leaves all over him. I had to stop and clean him off, all the time feeling the eyes of the neighbors watching me from their yards, not saying anything, just watching. I don't want to lie — really I didn't care that much that they were watching (watching him, and watching me take him for a walk). What bothered me was being forced to stand there, with my handkerchief getting all wet and muddy and full of bits of dead leaves, and having to grab on to him the whole time to keep him away from the puddle. Besides, I was used to walking down the street with my hands in my pockets, whistling or chewing gum, or reading comic books while keeping an eye on the stones of the sidewalks I know by heart all the way from my house to the streetcar stop, so that I know when I'm passing in front of Tita's house or when I get to the corner of Carabobo Street. But now I couldn't do any of that, and my handkerchief was starting to soak the lining of my pocket and I felt the dampness on my leg. It was really incredible having so much bad luck at the same time.

At that hour the streetcar is usually pretty much empty, and I prayed that we'd be able to sit together, keeping him on the window side so that he'd be less of a nuisance. It's not that he moves around much, but he annoys people all the same and I understand it. So I was aghast when we got on, because the streetcar was almost full and there were no double seats unoccupied. The trip was too long for us to ride on the platform; the conductor would have made me sit down and find him a seat somewhere else. So I hurried him in and found him a spot in the middle next to a woman who had the window seat. Ideally, I would have sat behind him to keep an eye on him, but the streetcar was full and I had to keep going forward and sit quite far away. The riders didn't seem to take much notice; at that hour people are still digesting their lunches and are lulled half asleep by the rocking of the streetcar. The problem was that the conductor stopped at the side of the seat where I had left him, tapping with a coin on the steel of the ticket machine, and I had to turn around and signal to him so that he'd come get the fare from me. I held up the money so he'd understand that I was buying tickets for two, but the guard was one of those gorillas who just stare stupidly and don't even try to understand, and he just kept tapping and tapping the machine with the coin. I had to get up (and now two or three riders were watching) and make my way to the other row. “Two tickets,” I said. He punched one, looked at me a minute, then handed me the ticket and lowered his head, just kind of peering at me sideways with one eye. “Two, please,” I repeated, certain that by now everybody in the car was watching. The gorilla punched the other ticket and handed it to me; he was about to say something but I gave him the exact change and beat it to my seat without looking back. The worst part of it was that I had to keep turning around to see if he was still sitting quietly on the seat behind me, and that was bound to draw the attention of the other riders. At first I promised myself that I'd only turn around each time we reached a street corner, but the blocks seemed terribly long and at every moment I expected to hear a shout or a scream, like that time with the Alvarez's cat. Then I started counting to ten, like in a boxing match, and that worked out to about half a block. Each time I reached ten I snuck a look back, by fixing the collar on my shirt for instance, or putting my hand in my pants pocket, anything that would look like a nervous tic or something like that.

I don't know why but after about eight blocks I got the impression that the woman sitting next to him by the window wanted to get off. That really was the worst thing that could happen, because she was sure to say something to him so that he would let her out, and when he didn't notice or didn't want to notice she might get mad and try to force her way through, but I knew what would happen in that case and so I was on tenterhooks, and I started looking back well before each corner. Finally it seemed to me that she really was about to try to get up, and I could have sworn that she said something because she glanced to her side and I thought I saw her lips move. Just at that moment an old fat lady stood up from one of the seats near me and started to make her way down the aisle, and I got up behind her wanting to shove her along, give her a kick in the legs so she'd hurry and let me reach the row where the woman was lifting up a basket or something she had at her feet and now was standing up to go. Finally I think I did shove the fat lady, I heard her object, and I don't know how I managed to reach the side of the seat and haul him up in time so that the woman could get off at the corner. Then I pushed him up against the window and sat down next to him, so relieved even if four or five idiots were watching me from their seats up front and from the platform where the gorilla must have said something to them.

Now we were passing through the El Once district. The sun was shining brightly and the streets were dry. At that time of day if I'd been traveling by myself I would have gotten off the streetcar to walk the rest of the way downtown on foot. For me it's nothing to walk from El Once to the Plaza de Mayo. Once I timed myself and it took me exactly thirty-two minutes, granted that I ran part of the way, especially at the end. But now, on the other hand, I had to keep an eye on the window, because one time somebody caught on to the fact that he was capable of opening the window and tossing himself out, just for kicks, like so many of his other whims that nobody can explain. Once or twice it seemed to me that he was about to lift the window, and I had to reach around behind him and grab it by the frame. Maybe it was just me; I can't really say for sure that he was about to lift it open and jump. For example, when the thing with the inspector happened I forgot about him entirely and he didn't throw himself out. The inspector was a tall, skinny guy who appeared on the front platform and started punching tickets in that chummy way that some of the inspectors have. When he came to my seat I handed him both tickets and he punched one; then he looked down, looked at the other ticket, started to punch it and froze for a minute with the ticket poised in the jaws of the punch, and the whole time I was praying for him to just get on with it and punch it and give it back to me, because it seemed like everyone on the bus was starting to stare at us. Finally he punched it, shrugged his shoulders, and handed both tickets back, and then I heard someone on the back platform let out a laugh, though naturally I didn't want to turn around. I put my arm around him again and grabbed hold of the window, pretending I didn't see the inspector or anybody else anymore at all. At Sarmiento and Libertad people started getting off, and by the time we got to Florida there was hardly anyone left. I waited until San Martín and then I made him get down by the front platform, because I didn't want to have to pass the gorilla, who might have said something to me.

I really like the Plaza de Mayo; when somebody says downtown I immediately think of the Plaza de Mayo. I like it because of the pigeons, because of the presidential palace, and because it carries so many memories from history, of the bombs that fell when there was a revolution, and of the caudillos that said they wanted to tie up their horses at the Obelisk. There are peanut vendors and hawkers that sell things, it's easy to find an empty bench and if you want you can keep going a bit and go down to the harbor and look at the ships and the derricks. Because of that I thought that the best thing would be to bring him to the Plaza de Mayo, away from the cars and buses, and just sit there for a while until it was time to go home. But no sooner did we get off the streetcar and start walking along San Martín than I started to feel queasy; all of a sudden I noticed how tired I felt, after spending nearly an hour on the streetcar having to keep looking back the whole time, pretending I didn't see that everyone was watching me, and then the guard with the tickets, and the woman who wanted to get off, and the inspector …

I really would have liked to go into a milk bar and get an ice cream or a glass of milk, but I was sure I wouldn't be able to, that I'd regret it if I went anywhere people were sitting down and would have time to look us over. In the street people just crossed and went their own way, especially in San Martín which is full of banks and offices and where everyone bustles about with portfolios tucked under their arms. So we just kept going until we got to the corner of Cangallo, and then as we were walking past the shop windows of Peuser's, which were full of inkwells and other elegant things. I could tell he didn't want to keep going, he kept getting heavier and heavier and as hard as I tugged (trying not to draw anyone's attention) I could hardly walk and finally I had to stop in front of the last window, pretending to look at the embroidered leather desk sets. Maybe he was a little tired, maybe it wasn't just a whim. Besides, it wasn't that bad to stay there like that, but all the same I didn't like it because people going by had more time to look us over, and two or three times I noticed somebody making some remark to someone else, or elbowing them in the ribs to get their attention.

Finally I couldn't take it any more and I grabbed hold of him again, tryiong to act like someone going for an ordinary walk, but each step was harder than in those dreams where you have shoes that weigh a ton and you can hardly lift them off the ground. Eventually I got him over the idea of standing there, and we continued along San Martín to the corner of the Plaza de Mayo. Now the problem was getting across the street, because he doesn't like to cross streets. He's perfectly capable of throwing himself out a streetcar window, but crossing streets he doesn't like. The worst part is that in order to get to the Plaza de Mayo you always have to cross a busy thoroughfare; at Cangallo and Bartolomé Mitre it wouldn't have been nearly as bad, but now I was on the verge of giving up, he dragged on my hand so much, and twice when the traffic stopped and the people who were lined up on our side started to make their way across, I realized that we would never make it to the other side because he was going to plant himself right in the middle, and so I decided to wait until he made up his mind. And of course now the guy from the newsstand on the corner was staring at us more and more every minute, and he said something to a kid my age who was making faces at me and said I don't know what in return, and cars kept going by and stopping and starting up again, and there we were stuck on the sidewalk. Sooner or later a cop was bound to come by; that would have been a disaster because the cops are good guys and so are bound to stick their noses in. They start asking questions, make sure you're not lost, and at any moment he could get one of his ideas into his head and who knows how it would all end up. The more I thought about it the more nervous it made me, and finally I felt really afraid, like I was going to throw up, I swear, and when the traffic stopped again I got a good grip on him and closed my eyes and pulled him ahead practically bending over double, and when we made it to the Plaza I let go of him, took a few more steps by myself, and then I walked back to him and I really just wished that he were dead, that I were dead, or that Mama and Papa were dead and me too while you're at it, that everybody was dead and buried except for Aunt Encarnación.

But such thoughts pass quickly; we saw that there was a very nice bench, completely empty, and I took hold of him without tugging and we went and sat on the bench to watch the pigeons, who fortunately don't let themselves get caught like cats do. I bought peanuts and caramels, I gave him a few, and we were all right there with the afternoon sun shining on the Plaza de Mayo and people going this way and that. I don't know exactly when it occurred to me to leave him there. All I can remember is that I was shelling a peanut for him and at the same time I was thinking that if I pretended to be throwing something to the pigeons who were just a little further off, it would be easy to go around the Obelisk and be out of his sight. At that point I'm not sure I was thinking about when I got home or about the look on the faces of Papa and Mama, because if I had I wouldn't have done such a stupid thing. It must be very hard to think of everything, like wise men and historians; all I was thinking was that I could just leave him there and go for a walk downtown with my hands in my pockets and buy myself a magazine or go in somewhere and have an ice cream before it was time to go home.

I kept on feeding him peanuts for a while but I had already made up my mind, and after a minute I pretended I was getting up to stretch my legs and I saw that it didn't matter to him if I stayed or if I wandered off to throw peanuts to the pigeons. I started tossing around the ones I had left, and the pigeons surrounded me until the peanuts were all gone and they lost interest. From the other end of the Plaza you could hardly see the bench; it was just a matter of crossing to the Casa Rosada, where there are always two grenadiers on guard, and walking alongside the building until I reached the Paseo Colón, that street that Mama says kids by themselves should stay away from. Out of habit I kept looking back, but there was no way he could follow me; the most he could do would be to wallow around next to the bench until some lady from the benevolent society or a cop came by.

I don't remember very well what happened as I made my way along the Paseo Colón, which is an avenue just like any other. Eventually I sat down on the bottom window ledge of an import-export company, and that's when my stomach started to hurt. Not like when you have to go to the bathroom; it was up further, where your stomach really is, and I wanted to breathe but it hurt; then I had to sit quietly and wait until the cramp went away, and in front of me I saw something like a green blob and little dancing stars, and Papa's face, in the end it was just Papa's face because I had closed my eyes, I think, and in the middle of the green blob was Papa's face. After a while I was able to breathe normally again, and some boys were there watching me and one of them said to the other that there must be something wrong with me, but I shook my head and said that it was nothing, that I got cramps all the time but that they always went away. One of them offered to get me a glass of water, and the other said I should wipe my forehead because I was sweating so much. I smiled and said I was fine, and I started walking again so they would go away and leave me alone. It's true that I was sweating because sweat was pouring down onto my eyebrows and a salty drop ran into my eye, and then I took out my handkerchief and ran it over my face. That's when I felt something scrape across my lip, and when I looked I found a dead leaf stuck in the handkerchief; it was the leaf that had scratched me.

I don't know how long it took me to get back to the Plaza de Mayo. Halfway there I fell down but I got up again right away before anyone noticed, and I dashed across the street between the cars driving in front of the Casa Rosada. From a distance I could see that he hadn't left the bench, but I kept on running and running until I reached him, and I threw myself down on the bench like I was dead while the startled pigeons flew away and people turned around to give me that look they give to kids when they see them running, like it's a sin or something. After a while I cleaned him up a little and told him that it was time to go home. I only said it so I could hear myself say it and feel better, because as far as he was concerned the only thing to do was to grab hold of him and bring him along, he didn't listen to words or just pretended not to listen. Luckily this time he didn't try to get up to any tricks crossing streets, and the streetcar was almost empty at the beginning of the trip, so I could shove him in the first row and sit next to him, and I didn't turn around once the whole trip back, not even when we got off. We walked the last block very slowly, him trying to get into the puddles and me struggling to keep him onto the dry stones. But it didn't matter, nothing mattered. I was thinking the whole time, “I abandoned him”; I looked at him and thought, “I abandoned him,” and though I hadn't forgotten what had happened on the Paseo Colón it made me feel so good, almost proud. Maybe another time… Who knew how Papa and Mama would look at me when they saw me leading him by the hand. Naturally they'd be happy that I'd brought him downtown — things like that always make parents happy — but I don't know why it occurred to me, just at that moment, that sometimes when Papa or Mama take out their handkerchiefs and dry their brows, every now and then they find a dead leaf inside that scratches them on the face.

The Tenant (conclusion)

[Back to Part I]

11. I had begun cobbling together a story from raw materials that originally had nothing to do with each other. On the one hand were impressions of Borges and his circle derived from a slender memoir by Alberto Manguel; on the other was the vaguely remembered dream from which I had awakened the morning after reading the memoir.

12. After writing a few pages I found myself quickly losing interest, in part because I myself didn't find the story believable. After all, I knew little about the setting and not much more about the characters of my little conte à clef, except for some bits about Borges I had gleaned from reading Emir Rodríguez Monegal's biography years before. I wasn't going to go to the trouble of researching the background, for one thing because ultimately I knew it would all be fakery; I've never been to Argentina and anything I would learn from my researches would be superficial and unreliable. Plus the story had turned into a kind of drawing-room literary satire that requires an alertness to social nuances which I do not in fact possess.

13. Still, I had four characters (five, if you count the young woman observed entering the building across the street) whom I had left hanging, their teacups poised in mid-air. So, not to draw things out further, here is how the story would have gone had it been my story to write, or had I been the writer to tell it:

14. Once the possibility has been raised that the young woman they have been observing might be in league with a vampire, one of the characters must suggest that they break into the apartment and have a look around. Perhaps it's one of those things that gets started as a joke and develops its own unstoppable momentum, each of the four raising the stakes a bit until they have committed themselves beyond recall. Borges, of course, being blind and elderly, must naturally be depicted as being at least as game as any of the others; Manguel, as the youngest, would largely defer to the rest. So it is Ocampo and Bioy Casares who do most of the egging on.

15. The next problem was how to get them into the building opposite, once the young woman has left for the day. My first thought would be that the lock would be picked, but who would do it? Who would be revealed as the secret possessor of the skills of a break-in artist? Bioy, the slightly disreputable man-about-town (as I depicted him), with a soupçon of James Bond in his makeup? Manguel, who, newly sobered up, reveals himself as a handy and resourceful character suitable to a Hardy Boys novel? Borges? Or, after they had failed miserably to gain access, would Ocampo show them all up with a hatpin? In the end I settled on an alternate contrivance: Ocampo would have noticed that the young woman always slipped the key into a windowbox upon leaving, and they would simply dig it out from among the petunias and open the door.

16. Once inside they would find the building deserted, dark, and barely furnished, the few pieces covered with dropcloths and shoved to the side. They would climb first one flight of stairs, then another, and as they reach the third floor (but in Argentina, of course, it would be only the second piso) they would be struck by a sudden and unexpected illumination. As they step forward into a large central room they would see that the roof above was made of glass, and as they enter this brightly lit solarium they would approach a couch, its back turned to them, and reclining on the couch, its head projecting over the top, they discover a skeleton …

17. At this point the young woman unexpectedly comes up behind them. “How dare you,” she says, or something along those lines; “What is the meaning of this?” There will be a moment of embarrassed silence until at last Borges steps forward. “My dear,” he says meekly but with impeccable dignity, “I must apologize for our intrusion. I'm afraid we have let our imaginations get the better of our judgment.” Then, while his companions stand abashed, he tells her the whole story.

18. The young woman appears to be, to some extent, mollified by this. (And besides, she has recognized the old man, as any resident of Buenos Aires would.) She briefly explains that she is an artist, the skeleton her model, and she pulls aside some coverings and shows them easels on which are displayed some of the accomplished, intricate anatomical drawings with which she has been occupying her afternoons.

19. But she does not quite accept the old man's abject expressions of regret. “An apology is not sufficient,” she declares sternly; “I demand compensation.” There is another awkward silence as the intruders anxiously ponder what kind of retribution the young woman may require. Speaking directly to Borges she says, “You must return later in the week, after my day's work is done, and be my guest for tea.” And then, as an afterthought, she adds, “you may bring your friends, if you like.” Borges nods, gravely, and of course he accepts her terms. With a great sense of relief the four leave the building, escorted by the young woman.

20. On the appointed day, Borges and the others appear at the front door, dressed elegantly and bearing flowers and a small cake. They ring the bell but there is no answer. Reluctant to barge in a second time, they wait outside, then ring the bell again. When no one appears one of them tries the door handle and they see that it is unlocked. They step inside and and call up the stairs, but there is no answer. They climb up through the building until once again they come into the solarium. There is no sign of the young woman, nor of the skeleton. The easels are gone and every other trace of the tenant has been cleared out. There is no note. The four writers stand together in the late afternoon sunlight, lost in thought.

The Tenant: untelling a story (I)

1. A few nights ago I began reading a slender volume by Alberto Manguel entitled With Borges. In it, Manguel relates how, as a teenager working in a bookstore in Buenos Aires in the 1960s, he became one of the many people who at one time or another were recruited to read to Jorge Luis Borges, who was by then almost entirely blind. From that starting point he sketches, in a mere seventy-odd pages, a genial portrait of Borges and his circle, touching on the great man's friendships, his character, his political opinions, and his reading habits, the latter being, to Borges, most important of all, much more so even than his own writing.

2. Before I woke up the following morning I experienced a sort of gothic dream, the details of which I have largely forgotten. The dream had nothing at all to do with Borges or with Argentina, but as I woke up, with Manguel's memoir on the bedside table and still fresh in my mind, the dream and the recollected traces of the previous night's reading began to converge, and by the time I was fully awake I had imagined the outlines of a short story in which Borges, his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, Bioy's wife Silvina Ocampo (herself a noted writer), and Alberto Manguel would be the participants in the events that had taken place in the dream. The story was to begin in the apartment long inhabited by Bioy and Ocampo, where Borges was a frequent visitor.

3. As soon as I could I began writing the story. But almost immediately the first of several obstacles arose. I have never been to Buenos Aires, and know next to nothing of its geography and neighborhoods. Borges, I knew, lived, when Manguel first met him, on the Calle Maipú. Was this within walking distance of the Calle Posadas, in the upscale Recoleta district, where his hosts lived? A bit of cursory research suggested it was not, but I wasn't sure. Would Borges have come on foot? I didn't know.

4. I began my story with the old man's arrival, the young Manguel at his side. Here was another problem. I referred to the character as “the old man,” and not by name, because I was in fact inventing the details of his appearance and bearing out of whole cloth. It was meant to be evident that the man was Borges, but any attempt to pass off my description of him as an accurate likeness would never pass scrutiny by anyone who knew better. And so I began:

The old man arrived, as was his custom, around nine, dressed in a faded grey suit and yellow necktie, a neatly folded handkerchief (surreptitiously spritzed with cologne by his maid) poking out of his suit pocket. He was accompanied by a young man they didn't know, no more than sixteen, with a wisp of beard and incipient mustache, who hung back slightly but didn't seem overawed to be in the company he was in.

Except for the fact that Borges habitually wore a suit only one detail of this was reliable, and it was lifted straight from Manguel: Borges's maid did sprinkle his handkerchiefs with eau de cologne, though apparently not on the sly.

5. Next I introduced the character who was meant to be Silvina Ocampo but at the same time also Victoria Ocampo, her sister and perhaps an even more important literary figure, at least in her role as publisher of the influential journal Sur. I knew very little about either sister, so I simply made it up:

The woman, in her sixties, tall, slender, and sporting a floral print dress and pearls, ushered them in and bestowed a quick, affectionate quick on the old man's cheek before returning, but only momentarily, to the kitchen, her shoe heels rapping loudly on the wood floors where there were no rugs.

As for Bioy Casares, he barely received a description at all:

Her husband, who was reclining in a worn upholstered armchair reading the evening paper, saluted the visitors warmly but did not get up.

6. It quickly became clear that it was going to be very tiresome not to be able to refer to any of my characters by name. There were only so many times I could refer to “the old man,” “the woman,” and “the husband” without it becoming monotonous. Manguel's character, at least, I could refer to, alternatingly and inconsistently, as “the boy” or “the young man.”

7. In my description of the scene in the apartment, I soon began drifting away from the sophisticated literary circles of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires into the world of Jiggs and Maggie. My Ocampo bustles from room to room while heating up a soup left by her maid, who has been given the night off. Bioy Casares, whom I depicted, without evidence, as an avuncular semi-alcoholic, pretends to grumble when his wife asked him to fix drinks for their guest, then plies the teenage Manguel with nearly undiluted scotch, which quickly takes its toll.

By the time the woman announced dinner the boy was quietly reeling but, he thought, managing not to show it. Fortunately the host stepped up to escort the old man, sparing the boy the embarrassment of leaning on his ostensible charge for stability. The woman had set out a garish china tureen and was ladling out a thin, dark liquid that was giving off whiffs of an unpromising aroma. There was a basket of thin bread, which went untouched. The boy saw the old man raise one spoonful, and then a second, to his lips, before carefully setting the implement down and dabbing delicately at the corners of his mouth with a napkin.

My only defense for anything in the above paragraph is Manguel's remark that meals at the Bioy-Ocampo household were uninspiring, consisting for the most part of “boiled vegetables.” Guests went there for scintillating conversation, not for the food.

8. As for conversation, I took a stab at it, with “the old man” breaking the dinnertime silence:

“This young man has been reading me Chesterton.”

The boy, hearing himself referred to, looked up with a start, and instantly broke out in a sweat. He had himself by now consumed several spoonfuls of the broth, and was not sure if it was the scotch or the food that was making him feel unwell.

“Father Brown or theology?” his host inquired.

“Father Brown,” came the answer. “Though to me they are equally mysterious.”

The others pondered this mot in silence for a moment, until the host turned to the boy.

“You speak English, I take it?”

“Yes,” he said, in his befuddlement trying to remember whether he actually did, or what the question meant, and whether he would as a consequence of his answer be asked to sing a few bars of Gilbert and Sullivan to prove it.

“He reads English passably well, and French too, in the manner in which they are taught by our schoolmasters,” the old man declared. The boy debated whether or not this was meant as a compliment, and decided that it would have to do.

“He sells me Penguins at Frau Lebach's,” the old man added, finally. For a moment the boy considered this statement, which was after all absolutely true, as well as the utter insouciance with which it was received by his hosts, then barely suppressed an attack of giggling before lowering his head and spoon solemnly in a feigned resumption of battle with the soup.

“I see,” said the woman, in something of the same tone, or so the boy imagined, in which she might have responded to a report of a sheep with two heads or a man who had lived for seven years inside a giant wheel of Stilton. Or perhaps not, for when he looked up she seemed to be regarding him kindly and he felt a pang of regret that he was almost certainly about to pass out into his soup bowl. At the last minute he was saved; the woman stood up abruptly, whisked away the plates, and strode with them out of the room and into the kitchen, where she deposited them into the sink without troubling to rinse them off. She was back in what seemed like a few seconds but was probably ten minutes, bearing cups of rich, strong tea.

"Frau Lebach's" was Pygmalion, the “Anglo-German” bookstore owned by Lili Lebach, where Manguel was employed and where Borges was a customer. Whether Manguel spoke English or French or German at the time (Borges knew them all) I had no idea; I simply assumed that since he was working in a foreign-language bookstore he must have some facility with languages. “Insouciance” was ridiculous; it wasn't the right word but I couldn't think of another.

9. It's common knowledge that Borges read Chesterton's Father Brown stories, and Manguel relates that in spite of his own lack of religious belief he was fascinated by and enjoyed reading theology. But the real point of all this badinage and low comedy is to advance the plot, by means of a shameless segue. (Having finally grown tired of being unable to call my characters by name, I settled on the half-measure of “Sylvie” for Silvina Ocampo.)

“Perhaps Sylvie could make employment of your Father Brown,” her husband said. “She is convinced that there is a mystery afoot in the neighborhood.”

“Ah, is that so?” said the old man, perking up slightly.

“He's making fun of me again,” said the woman. “He never believes anything I tell him.”

“That's not true, my dear. I'm just suggesting that perhaps the good Father, were he here, would be able to clarify the mystery, that's all.”

“What is the nature of the mystery, may I ask?” inquired the old man.

The couple hesitated. “You tell them,” said the woman.

“No, my dear, it's your mystery. By all means you must tell it.”

“Very well, but you must refrain from mocking me while I do so.”

“My lips are sealed.”

“That would be a miracle. It's like this. There's a three-storey house across the street, on the corner, that has been vacant for some time. Three weeks ago, while I was writing by the window in my study, a moving van pulled up outside the building. Two men got out and stood by the truck for about an hour, until a woman in her late twenties or early thirties arrived by cab. She unlocked the front door, and the two men carried a long wooden crate — about six feet long or a little more — into the building. A few minutes later they returned, took a few smaller crates out of the van, brought them inside, and drove away. The woman remained inside the building for about an hour, then left. The following day she arrived at around ten in the morning, carrying a large valise. She stayed until four in the afternoon, then left for the day, valise in hand. Since then she has returned, almost every day, at the same time, and always leaves by nightfall. No one else has entered the building.”

“How can you be sure that no one has entered the building when you weren't looking?” the young man interjected.

There was an uncomfortable silence. The husband finally broke it:

“Sylvie has been watching out the window, almost all day and all night, for more than two weeks. She has hardly slept”

“I am positive no one else has entered the building. And the woman is never there at night.”

“Perhaps it is Bram Stoker that you need, and not Chesterton,” the old man drily observed.

10. And there, perhaps a third of the way through the story, having descended into banalities unworthy of an Agatha Christie novel, I threw in the towel. But there was more of the story still to be told.

(To be continued)

New Directions in the 1940s

James Laughlin started his career as publisher in 1936 with the first New Directions in Prose & Poetry, but in addition to the flagship anthology he soon branched out into other projects, some small-scale, others remarkably ambitious for a small press (the family's steel fortune was put to excellent use). By 1941 the New Directions annual was well over 700 pages and encompassed writing by Bertolt Brecht, Delmore Schwartz, Julien Gracq, Franz Kafka, John Berryman, Ezra Pound, and many others.

The following year, well ahead of the celebrated Latin American literary “boom,” the house issued a similarly hefty bilingual Antología de la poesía americana contemporánea / Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry. Edited by the classicist Dudley Fitts, the anthology included poets like Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Pablo Neruda, and Cesar Vallejo, all of whom would remain largely unknown to the American literary audience for another generation.

But New Directions didn't just think big; it also thought small, and in fact Laughlin experimented with a variety of formats, from chapbooks to subscription publishing to limited editions. Some of these experiments didn't work out and were quickly abandoned; others became long-running series with lasting influence on both publishing and literature.

The Poets of the Year series, begun in 1941, was one early New Directions series. According to Laughlin, writing many years later,

I hit on the idea of a series of 32-page pamphlets of poetry, each one printed by a different fine printer, an artist of design. It seems incredible now but I was able to sell these for fifty cents, or $5.50 for a boxed set to subscribers.

Though Laughlin was enjoined by the Book-of-the-Month Club from calling the series “the poet of the month,” the chapbooks were in fact issued on a monthly basis for the first three years (1941-1943); in 1944, the final year, wartime paper rationing caused a reduction to six issues, including the one shown here.


Once again Laughlin was ahead of the curve: Alberti, a Spanish poet then living in exile in Argentina, would remain otherwise relatively little known in the English-speaking world until the appearance of Ben Belitt's rather poor translation in the 1960s and Mark Strand's much better one in 1973. This particular volume was printed for New Directions by the Press of Henry G. Johnson; the other volumes in the final year of the series were Selected Poems of Herman Melville, “designed by” Margaret Evans; Thomas Merton's Thirty Poems, printed by the Marchbanks Press; The Soldier by Conrad Aiken (the George Grady Press); A. M. Klein's The Hitleriad (the Samuel Marcus Press); and A Little Anthology of Mexican Poets (the Printing Office of the Yale University Press). The last of those was edited by Lloyd Mallan, who also translated the Alberti. The latter is a saddle-stitched paperback, with a removable dust jacket; the books were also published hardbound, for a dollar an issue.

Below is the fourth (and final) number of a short-lived New Directions periodical called Pharos, from 1947. The version of Confucius it contains is by Ezra Pound, a New Directions mainstay from almost the beginning of the house. Not having seen the other numbers I can't be sure, but its possible that in this instance the poet's name was left off the cover (but not off the title page) because its appearance on bookstore shelves so soon after World War II might have touched a raw nerve, given Pound's flirtation with Fascism.


The text ends on page 53 (page 49 is mistakenly paginated 39), and is followed by eleven pages of ads, including a full-pager from the Gothan Book Mart. (As in the early issues of New Directions in Prose & Poetry, the ads are arguably as interesting as the editorial matter.)

According to an editor's note inside, Pharos was being phased out in favor of Direction, an example of which, from 1949, appears below:


Unlike Pharos, which was wrapped in something resembling blotter paper, the volumes in the Direction series were jacketed hardcovers, retailing for $1.50 each. This particular one is in a “pocket-size” format, roughly 4 ½ x 6 ½. Although they were available on a subscription basis, they have now crossed the line from magazine to book. Other selections listed on the jacket include Albert Guerard's Joseph Conrad, Cyril Connoly's The Rock Pool, and Nabokov's Nine Stories. Although he isn't credited, I think the jacket design may be by Alvin Lustig, who did many covers for New Directions, in particular for its successful New Classics line.

Next is a bilingual anthology that wouldn't seem like the company's typical fare; in fact you could easily miss the fact that it was a New Directions book at all, since the only place that it's identified as such is at the bottom corner of the front flap of the dust jacket.


The jacket itself is unusual, having been made of some kind of transparent plastic, possibly acetate. The lettering you see is not on the boards but on the acetate (if that's what it is); the illustration, however, is on the book. According to the colophon, “three thousand copies of this book were printed in April MCMXLIX by the University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” There are some nice illustrations inside, and the spine is ornamented with a decorative motif. It sold for $7.50, rather pricey at the time.

Finally, a more enduring literary monument (if an ambivalent one), sized to match. Here is an early (but not first) printing of Pound's collected Cantos, published in 1948.


The book, which sold for $5.00, is confusingly paginated, as each succeeding section starts the numbering afresh, and there's no table of contents. In later editions, at least since the 1970s, the dust jacket has been changed to a reddish-orange color, the typography has been redone, and the drawing of the poet (by Gaudier-Brzeska) no longer appears.

In my experience, innovative literary presses tend to follow a certain generational pattern. Companies like New Directions, Grove Press, Black Sparrow, the Ecco Press, or the original North Point Press — each of them closely identified with one or two innovative founders — find a niche in the marketplace with some fresh ideas, publishing authors and kinds of books that aren't being represented by the mainstream houses. A decade or two later the ideas are widely imitated or just don't seem that interesting anymore and the house, if it survives, gets absorbed by a major publisher or just settles into tame old age.

By most standards, New Directions under James Laughlin had a longer run than most. By the time I started reading New Directions books, in the early 1970s, the press had settled on the handsome and serviceable look of the New Directions Paperbook line.


It was a superb series in many ways, but the kind of experimentation with format the house conducted in its midcentury heyday was mostly in the past. Today, after Laughlin's death in 1997, New Directions continues to uphold a fine publishing tradition but it's no longer groundbreaking in the way it was in its first decades.

Update (January 2009): When I wrote the above I was not aware of Geoffrey Connell's translation of Alberti's Sobre los angeles (Concerning the Angels), which was published by Rapp and Carroll in 1967 and which also appeared, apparently in full, in — where else? — New Directions 19 in 1966.

Update (December 2013): New Directions is now revisiting some of its innovative marketing ideas, in the form of poetry and prose chapbook subscriptions. Hats off to them.

Beach read

I picked up this thin volume of stories, the cover of which is now rather yellowed and soiled, in the Strand Bookstore sometime in 1976 or 1977, after hearing the author read selections on WBAI radio. All I knew about Glenda Adams (until recently, when I read that she had died about a year ago) was what it said in the author bio on the back cover, that she was born in Sydney, Australia in 1939, was the Associate Director of something called Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and that she lived in New York City with her daughter. Adams went on to publish several other works of fiction, one of which, Dancing on Coral, won the Miles Franklin Award in 1987, but I've never happened across any of them.

Australia always seems to have more than its share of venomous creatures, and these stories fit in quite nicely. In most of them someone has something decidedly nasty done to them by someone else. Adams's view of family life and relations between men and women is unsparingly bleak, and after reading stories like “Wedding” and “The Circle” it's not surprising that her bio says that she lived “with her daughter” and not “with her husband and their daughter.”

In what may be the most pointedly feminist story in the book (and also one of the best) a woman is given instructions in how to behave “like a princess,” which is apparently what she is. After having been elaborately dressed by several attendants, she is brought before a man who is to serve as her tutor. He teaches her the precise rules of etiquette of the three languages (high, low, and middle) and three conversations (host, guest, and in transit) she will need to comport herself properly, and then is put to a series of tests.

In the first test, she must shake hands with thousands of people and converse with them, “using the host conversation in the high language.” Only at the end does she notice that her hands are badly swollen from so many handshakes. She feels no pain, and she has not cried out: she has passed the test.

For her next challenge she must undertake a long journey by train, in a carriage jammed with passengers. She travels incognito, because “it would make other people uncomfortable and ashamed” were she to travel as a princess. The only concessions to her true status are the rings on her right hand, which she keeps carefully concealed, and her earrings. Only after she arrives at her destination does she discover that during the overnight passage thieves had sliced off her earlobes to steal the earrings. She had felt nothing. Once again, she has passed the test.

Finally she takes another journey, this time by sea, and arrives at a small island with a hill in the middle. At the end of the story she sits on the hill, gazing at the ground.

I now found that my body was hollow. And inside myself I discovered a small amount of room, a private space in which to move.

But in the best story in the volume, “Sea,” the young narrator is not a passive victim but a destroying angel. From the very beginning it's clear that her arrival does not bode well, at least for the male members of her family.

I was born within the sound of the waves, in a house on a sandstone cliff. It was the hottest night of the century.

The night I was born my father went swimming. It was the last time he ever went into the water.

Well, not quite the last time, as we shall learn. But on that night her father, a strong and avid swimmer, goes for a swim in the ocean and soon finds himself heading farther and farther away from shore. Miles out, he is finally pulled from the water by a fishing boat, despite his protestation that he is not tired and intends to swim on to New Zealand, “and if possible Chile.” He is turned over to the police, put under observation, then released to the family a day later.

After that, my father would go only to the water's edge. He refused to wear, or even own, a bathing suit, nor would he wear shorts or go without a shirt on summer days. Sometimes he took off his shoes and socks and rolled his trousers above his ankles and walked along the beach or around the rocks, letting the sea lap at his feet.

I never saw any part of his body except his head, his hands and his feet.

After the narrator is born a son follows. The two children have little in common. The boy is bronzed, good-natured, and a good swimmer; the girl is pale, taciturn, and has no interest in the water. She also has a way of unnerving people, particularly her father:

My father often stood by the window and watched the sea. Some mornings he went to the phone box at the terminus down at the bay and called his office to say he was sick. Then he would stay by the window all day watching the sea, frowning.

I, too, watched the sea, and I was able to stay very still beside the window for long periods of time.

My father never liked me to come near him, especially when he stood by the window. I had to choose a window in another room for myself. If I refused to leave him alone, he would slam out of the room and often right out of the house, leaving rattling floors and doors behind him.

On occasion, however, he became so consumed with watching that I was able to move quietly into the room and remain near him for hours without his hearing or feeling me.

People often remarked that it was most unusual for a child to be able to stay still and quiet for more than a minute or two. People said I was an unusual child, and they were always very glad to turn to my little brother.

One morning the two children go down to the sea, where the narrator's talent for storytelling leads to a horrific outcome. Wrapped in an old bedspread to shield herself from the sun, she asks him how long he thinks the longest story is. He says an hour or two at most, and she tells him that she knows “a story that lasts until the sun goes down.” When he doubts this, she agrees to tell it to him — but only after he promises to listen to the entire story from start to finish.

He lay down on the sand beside me on his stomach. He lay rigid and attentive.

And I closed my eyes and told a story that contained one sentence for every grain of salt in the sea.

I opened my eyes when my father grabbed my shoulders and shook me and slapped me many times over the head.

“You've gone and killed your little brother,” he said. “Is no one safe with you?”

The shadow of my sunhat stretched out in front of me and was long enough to be almost touched by the water. The sun was on its way behind the houses on the hill behind the beach.

My brother lay on the sand beside me. His body was swollen and had changed from nut brown to deep red. His mouth had fallen open and sand was clinging to his lips and tongue. But he was not dead.

For two weeks my brother lay on his stomach in bed. The doctor came every day to treat him for sunstroke and dress the burns on his back.

When the wounds began to heal, it became clear that the sun had left behind dark brown spots and scars, all over his beautiful back.

After he recovers, the boy gives his sister wide berth. As soon as he is old enough he leaves school and moves out, sending an occasional postcard home. In time the family moves inland, away from the sea. The narrator, older now, meets a boy with a car, and sometimes comes home late at night. This leads to a sudden, yet inevitable, ending.

“What do you think you're doing,” he screamed, “staying out till all hours?”

I said nothing. “You should be thinking of your studies and your exams,” he said, “not boys.”

I smiled at him.

He strode over to my bed and shook me.

I only smiled.

He kept on holding my shoulders.

“You're enough to drive a man out of his mind,” he said.

He moved his hands to my neck. He touched my ears and my head. Then he put his hands over his face.

“I don't know why I try to keep on living,” he cried.

“So why do you?” I asked.

He drowned three weeks later.

Lies and Stories was published by the Inwood Press, which I'm sure is long defunct. My copy has a little “Review Copy” slip laid in, with the publication date of October 15, 1976.

Las fases de Severo

The following discussion of a Julio Cortázar short story was written in 1980 as part of a longer project. At some point in the future I may post other sections as well, but this one seemed, with a little re-working, to be self-contained enough to post on its own. Were I writing this now I might choose to explore additional avenues, including the symbolic employment of moths in Cortázar's work, and some affinities with some scenes in Harry Mathews' novel The Conversions. The translations were almost certainly my own, as they don't exactly match the official version by Gregory Rabassa which was published that same year in the collection A Change of Light.

“Las fases de Severo” (“Severo's Phases”) is a relatively brief and simple story that nevertheless manages to be irreducibly uncanny. Said to be inspired by the paintings of Remedios Varo (to whose memory it is dedicated), it takes place in a house in Argentina, where the friends and relatives of a man named Severo have gathered for what appears to be his wake, or more accurately, his death-watch:

Como a las once de la noche habíamos llegado con Ignacio, el Bebe Pessoa y mi hermano Carlos. Eramos un poco de la familia, sobre todo Ignacio que trabajaba en la misma oficina de Severo, y entramos sin que se fijaran demasiado en nosotros. El hijo mayor de Severo nos pidió que pasaramos al dormitorio, pero Ignacio dijo que nos quedaríamos un rato en el comedor; en la casa había gente por todas partes, amigos o parientes que tampoco querían molestar y se iban sentado en los rincones o se juntaban al lado de una mesa o de un aparador para hablar o mirarse.

Around eleven at night we had arrived with Ignacio, Bebe Pessoa, and my brother Carlos. We were practically part of the family, especially Ignacio who worked in the same office as Severo, and we came in without anyone taking particular notice of us. Severo's oldest son asked us to go into the bedroom, but Ignacio said we would stay a while in the dining room. In the house there were people everywhere, friends or relatives who didn't want to get in the way either and who were sitting down in corners or gathering by a table or a sideboard to talk and regard each other.

After a while Severo's brother appears and announces the beginning of la fase del sudor, the sweating phase. In the bedroom to which everyone now repairs, Severo is seen sitting up in bed, his hands on his knees. The congregants gather around the bed to witness the unfolding events:

A diferencia de otros que según Ignacio tendían a impacientarse, Severo se quedaba inmóvil, sin siquiera mirarnos, y casi en seguida el sudor le había cubierto la cara y las menos.

Unlike others who according to Ignacio tended to become impatient, Severo remained still, even without looking at us, and almost immediately sweat had recovered his face and hands.

This sweating phase is the first in a series whose order is not completely fixed but which is apparently familiar to the onlookers and not unique to Severo's case. When it is over the narrator and some of the others step out of the room while Severo is dried off and changed. Word then comes that the next phase is beginning, “the leaping phase”:

Ignacio se bebió el café de un trago … Fue de los que se ubicuaron cerca de la cama, con la mujer de Severo y el chico menor que se reía porque la mano derecha de Severo osciliaba como un metrónomo … Severo dio el primer salto y quedó sentado al borde de la cama … Los saltos se sucedían rítmicamente: sentado al borde de la cama, sentado contra la cabecera, sentado en el borde opuesto … Cuando la mujer de Severo anunció el fin de la fase, todos empezaron a hablar al mismo tiempo y a felicitar a Severo que estaba como ajeno …

Ignacio drank the coffee in one gulp … He was one of those who took a place by the bed, with Severo's wife and his youngest son who laughed because Severo's right hand was oscillating like a metronome … Severo made the first leap and remained seated on the edge of the bed … The leaps passed rhythmically; sitting on the edge of the bed, sitting against the headboard: sitting on the opposite edge … When Severo's wife announced the end of the phase we all began to talk at once and to congratulate Severo, who seemed as if he wasn't there …

When it's clear that the phase of the moths is about to begin the ceiling lamp is turned off and an acetylene lamp is brought in. Moths flock into the room and begin circling around the lamp. One large moth breaks away, flies to Severo's bed, and alights on his cheek, followed by the rest of the moths, who cover his hair and face; only one moth still circles the lamp. For the relatives and friends watching it is a moment of great tension:

Sentí que los dedos de Ignacio se me clavaban en el antebrazo, y sólo entonces me di cuenta de que también yo temblaba y tenía una mano hundida en el hombro del Bebe. Alguién gimió, una mujer, problamente Manuelita que no sabía dominarse como los demás …

I felt Ignacio's fingers digging into my forearm, and only then did I notice that I too was trembling and that I had a hand sunk into Bebe's shoulder. Someone screamed, a woman, probably Manuelita who didn't know how to control herself like the others …

When the final moth flies up to Severo's face a general shout rings out, someone turns on the ceiling light again, and the moths fly out of the room. Again there is a general exodus while Severo is washed and prepared for the next phase; the narrator and his friends drink grapa. There is a brief exchange between the narrator and Ignacio, who seems to be particularly knowledgeable about these matters:

— Si la última polilla hubiera elegido — … empecé. Ignacio hizo una lente señal negativa con la cabeza.

“If the last moth had chosen … ” I began. Ignacio shook his head slowly.

In the next phase, “the phase of numbers,” Severo, sitting up, his hands in the pockets of his pajamas, looks at each person in the room and addresses each in turn, pronouncing a single number:

Mirando a su hijo mayor dijo: “6,” mirando a su mujer dijo: “23,” con una voz tranquila y desde abajo, sin apurarse.

Looking at his oldest son he said: “6,” looking at his wife he said: “23,” with a tranquil voice, from below, without hurrying.

The narrator is assigned the number two. Eventually the number one falls to a quiet woman, probably a distant relative. A few more numbers are given out after this, but in contrast to the hushed anticipation with which the earlier ones had been received they are no longer given much attention. Another bit of conversation outside the room afterwards assures us of the importance of the numbers without telling us in so many words exactly just what they portend:

— Por supuesto es una cuestión de tiempo — me dijo Ignacio cuando salimos del dormitorio — Los números por sí mismos no quieren decir nada, che.

— ¿A vos te parece? — le pregunté —

— Pero claro, che — dijo Ignacio — Fíjate que del 1 al 2 pueden pasar años, pónele diez o veinte, en una de esas mas.

— Seguro — apoyó el Bebe — . Yo que vos no me afligía.

“Of course it's a question of when,” Ignacio said to me as we left the bedroom. “The numbers themselves don't mean anything, friend.”

“You think so?” I asked.

“But of course, friend,” Ignacio said. “Understand that from the 1 to the 2 years could pass, ten or twenty maybe, sometimes more.”

“Sure,” Bebe concurred. “If I were you I wouldn't get upset.”

The actual significance of the numbers depends, we are told, on the final phase, “the phase of the watches.” Again Severo speaks to each person in the room, informing each in turn that their timepieces are, in their respective cases, either fast or slow by a certain number of minutes. Severo's youngest son — the same one who had laughed earlier — does not understand when Severo speaks to him, and he laughs again. His mother removes his watch to change the time for him:

Sabíamos que era un gesto simbólico, bastaba simplemente adelantar o astrasar las agujas sin fijarse en el número de horas o minutos, puesto que al salir de la habitación volveríamos a poner los relojes en hora.

We knew that it was a symbolic gesture, it was enough to simply advance or turn back the hands without noting the number of hours or minutes, because once we were out of the room we would put the watches back on the correct time.

The narrator is told that his watch is slow. This constitutes “an advantage,” a potential extenuation of the inauspiciously low number he had received in the previous phase.

The phase completed, there is another exodus, more grapa, until word arrives that “sleep is about to come.” Severo lies in bed, looking up, “motionless and indifferent.” Eventually he closes his eyes and a daughter lays over his face a handkerchief into which she had previously sewn four coins. Severo's wife closes the vigil saying, “And now he will sleep … Now he's asleep, look.” The room empties except for a few close family members, and the participants in the vigil begin to leave. Severo's youngest son, the one who had laughed during the phase of the leaps, walks outside with the narrator and his friends:

— ¿No juegan mas? — me preguntó …

— No, ahora hay que ira a dormir — le dije — Tu mamá te va a acostar, ándate adentro que hace frio.

— ¿Era un juego, verdad, Julio?

— Sí, viejo, era un juego. Anda a dormir, ahora.

“Aren't they playing anymore?” he asked …

“No, now it's time to go to sleep,” I told him. “Your mama will put you to bed, go on inside, it's cold.”

“It was a game, wasn't it, Julio?”

“Yes, old man, it was a game. Go to bed now.”

The adults walk down the street together for a while, smoking, then separate to take their ways home.

It's perfectly clear, from the preparations, from the gathering of friends and relatives, from the end of the evening in Severo's “sleep,” that “Las fases de Severo” is about death, and yet at no time does anyone use the word. The narrative is oblique; the nature of the phrases, the significance of the numbers given out, are things that are assumed to be understood, not things that are to be revealed. We aren't told what happened to Severo, or why he is going through the process on this particular night.

The evening's events have the character of ritual, in the coins sewn into the handkerchief (for Charon), in the purely symbolic advancing or turning back of the watches, in the details of the phases themselves. Yet the phases contain both natural and conventional elements. (The distinction between the two must be something only those — like the reader — who do not participate in the ritual attempt to make.) The complicity of the moths, the apparent oracular possession of Severo, the voluntary changing of the sheets and switching on and off of lights by the attendants, all are elements of a whole. It is a scene from primitive religion, yet the setting is urban Latin America, presumably Buenos Aires, and the narrator seems like an ordinary middle-class city-dweller of the 20th century.

The questions posed by Severo's little son at the end of the story show that he hasn't yet been initiated into the mysteries of the ritual of the phases, that he doesn't understand its significance and accept it in the way the adults do. To him it's all a game. But whose view of the ceremony is correct: his, or that of his elders? On the one hand the boy clearly doesn't yet understand the gravity and horror of death, doesn't understand that his father has been taken from the family forever. And he hasn't been socialized into what the adults accept as a given, that the bizarre ritual of the phases is a natural ceremony, or at least (to take a phrase from another story about ritual, “Con legitimo orgullo”) a ceremony that it “has its reason for being.” Yet there is something unsettling, and demystifying, about the boy's questions, as if the ritual were in fact merely an elaborate make-believe in which everyone, Severo included, only pretends to have faith.

Like all mourning customs, the ceremony of the phases is an attempt to domesticate death within the bounds of an social framework, in this case one that includes the participation of natural (or supernatural) actors. The boy challenges that domestication, and in so doing he shakes the underpinnings of the adults' carefully constructed defenses against death. The ending of the story is decidedly uneasy, as the adults walk away smoking cigarettes, sin hablar mucho — without talking much — and when the narrator gets home he gives an excuse for not going to sleep that is distinctly unconvincing:

Yo subiría a mi pieza y pondría a calentar la pava del mate, total no valía la pena acostarse por tan poco tiempo, mejor ponerse las zapatillas y fumar y tomar mate, esas cosas que ayudan.

I would go up to my room and put the mate kettle on, in the end it wasn't worth the effort to go to bed for such a little time, it was better to put on my slippers and smoke and drink mate, these things that help.

His lingering unease is evidence of the frailty of the elaborate charade in which the narrator and his fellows have just participated. In the end death eludes every effort to tame it.

Young Perceval

One day when I was in my late teens, while wandering in my local library I found a copy of Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz's The Grail Legend, which had been published (in a translation by Andrea Dykes) by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1970. I had no particular familiarity with or interest in Jungian psychology (and still don't), nor, as far as I can remember, did I have any previous exposure to the medieval romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and the other Grail chroniclers. I don't think I had even heard yet of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the priceless travesty of Arthurianism that I would eventually heartily enjoy but which hadn't at the time been released. The words “holy grail” were just a cliché one heard; that there were actual literary works of merit concerned with the Grail was not something I had been taught in high school.

The Grail Legend was thick with psychoanalytic jargon and references to obscure works that were untranslated or buried in scholarly libraries, but I was quickly hooked. For the next couple of years I haunted libraries and bookstores in several cities looking for editions of Grail romances and secondary works, at times searching for volumes that I wasn't even sure existed. In those pre-digital days, and with no proper bibliography at hand, I searched through haystacks like Books in Print and The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, dealing with such frustrations as the fact that the names of the author of the oldest known Grail story, Perceval, le Conte du Graal, and the author of the German Parzival could each have been alphabetized in at least three different ways, assuming that there was consensus on how to spell their names at all, which there wasn't always (Chrétien is occasionally spelled Chrestien).

In truth there really wasn't much out there to find. Though Perceval was Chrétien's most famous work it wasn't even included (presumably because it was never finished) in the Everyman's Library edition of Arthurian Romances that collected his other poems, and I had to settle for the version in the Modern Library College Edition of Medieval Romances, edited by Roger Sherman Loomis and Laura Sherman Loomis, which I remember as lacking in notes and explanatory material. I read Jessie Weston's fascinating if unreliable From Ritual to Romance, which had influenced T. S. Eliot, found the existing paperback editions of Robert de Boron, the Mabinogion, and The Quest of the Holy Grail, and of course Wolfram's wonderfully entertaining Parzival, in the Vintage edition translated by Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage. (I never got around to Sir Thomas Malory, who seemed too much of a latecomer to be of interest.)

Most frustrating of all was the absence of any accessible translation — maybe of any translation at all — of the Continuations to Chrétien's romance composed by several hands in the years following his death. Today there is at least one edition of part of the Continuations, Nigel Bryant's Perceval: The Story of the Grail, (which I haven't seen), but at the time all I could turn up, on the shelves of a university library, was William Roach's multi-volume The Continuations of the Old French 'Perceval' of Chrétien de Troyes, which was expensive and in any case only included the original text, which I wasn't enough of a scholar to benefit from. Although they are generally considered by scholars to be inferior in both inspiration and craft to Chrétien's fragment, the Continuations, at least the portions summarized in the Jung and Von Franz volume, sounded particularly intriguing to me at the time. Here for instance, is The Grail Legend's paraphrase of a portion of the Gautier Continuation:

Instead of going directly to the Fisher King's castle, Perceval first visits another castle which he has seen not far from the river. He rides into the courtyard through the open gate. Two tall fir trees grow there, but no inhabitants are to be seen. He dismounts, ties up his horse, leans his shield against the wall and goes into the great hall. There he sees lance holders, a pack of hounds and, in the centre of the hall, a magnificent ivory couch. In front of it stands a chessboard, fashioned of gold and azure, the pieces, encrusted with precious stones, set out as if inviting a game. Perceval seats himself and makes a move, whereupon the figures on the opposing side begin to move of themselves and soon checkmate him. The chessmen then set themselves out again and the game starts once more, with the same result. Perceval is mated three times running. Furious, he sweeps up the pieces into a corner of his cloak and is about to throw them out of the window, into the water below, when suddenly a young woman rises from the depths and restrains him. She is wearing a red dress strewn with shining, twinkling stars, and is of an enchanting beauty. Emerging as far as the waist, she upbraids him for wanting to throw her chessmen into the water. He promises not to if she, in return, will grant him her company. She agrees and allows him to lift her in through the window. When she presses against him his heart behaves so strangely that he begins to sigh. When she asks what is troubling him, he kisses her and would have desired still more had she not told him that if he would win her love he must first hunt the white stag in the nearby park and bring her its head. Then she will give herself to him. He should take her small white hound, which the stag would certainly not be able to escape, but he must not lose it or forget his weapons.

And so on. There seemed to be an endless amount of this kind of material. Perceval and the other Grail hero, Gawain, wander through forests, from castle to castle, through a landscape that seemed to be half Unicorn Tapestries and half J. G. Ballard. As the continuators crank out thousands of lines (dwarfing the scale of Chrétien's own work) the innocent, straightforward charm of the original narrative has been left behind, and the Grail itself seems to have been reduced to just one wonder among many, but in compensation there are any number of uncanny marvels, an apparently inexhaustible outpouring of inventions derived from who knows where, folklore or Celtic religion or Christian hagiography or the fancy of the continuators. As good Jungians, of course, Jung and Von Franz tried to fit all of it — Chrétien's graceful educational romance, Wolfram's boisterous comic novel, the work of the continuators, and more — into a logically structured psychological framework. This was interesting if not entirely convincing, but in any case it was beside the point. It was the bounty of story, unaccountable, irreducible, inherently uncompletable, that I was drawn to. The fact that I could only read the Continuations themselves second-hand and in fragments only increased their fascination.

At one point I toyed with the idea of writing my own Grail story, of which I wrote a few fragments before abandoning the idea. (Though not entirely; many years later elements of Perceval's tale found their way into a novella which had begun its life in an entirely different vein.) In time, though, I moved on to other obsessions, and stored my Grail library away in boxes in the cellar.

Chrétien's Perceval, is, of course, the perfect tale for a young man making his way into the world, especially if that young man is also a bit of a naïf. Its hero, though of knightly pedigree, has grown up in the forest, cared for only by his mother. He takes the instructions she offers him at their parting so much to heart that he commits one gaffe after another. He kisses a woman who is promised to another and steals her ring, provoking the fury of her paramour; he commits multiple infractions against knightly protocol; and worst of all, he fails, through his silence, to pose the questions that would heal the wounded Fisher King and restore the Grail lands to their rightful glory.

The enigmas of the Grail itself, whence it came and who is served by it, have never seemed to me to be as interesting as Perceval's own progress, for mysteries once resolved soon lose their allure. The later Grail romances, in which the story of the Grail is integrated into an explanatory narrative stretching back to Joseph of Arimathea, seem to me far less appealing than such crude oddities as the Welsh Peredur, in which the Grail itself has been forgotten, to be replaced by a severed head.

We don't know why, at the end of his career, Chrétien left Perceval unfinished, although the most obvious explanation is that he died or became ill before it could be completed. To the modern mind, though, conditioned by Kafka's curious trail of suspended masterpieces, it is tempting (if improbable) to imagine that he left it unfinished because he didn't want to reach the story's end.

The young man, as he heads out into the forest, expects that when he arrives at the place where the trees thin out and a castle appears from out of the mist he will find there the answers that will provide him with the resolution to his quest. The older he gets and the more he wanders, the more he hopes that the castle will never appear, or that if it does it will prove to be not what he had been looking for after all.

Notebook

Last night I drove with my daughter to a club to hear a musician and singer whom I've long admired and whose visits to this country are few and far between. Though it was a bit of a drive — about an hour north — I had never seen perform him live and didn't want to pass up the chance, not knowing whether the opportunity would be repeated since neither of us is getting any younger.

As it turned out, the show itself was a bit of a letdown, thoroughly professional as one would expect but lacking fire. I had the feeling that he felt obliged to play but didn't really want to be there, didn't quite have his heart in it. It was particularly disappointing because he has always had a reputation for being a charismatic live performer. Too many years on the road, too much water under the bridge, I guess.

After we left I got lost and wound up taking a road home I had never been on before. It ran along the shoreline, and even at that hour there were people coming up from the beach, getting in their cars and heading home. The great suspension bridge soared out over the bay as we approached.

As I drove I became increasingly alarmed by the realization that I couldn't remember the latter part of the show. In fact I had no memory of the half-hour before we left the club at all. The time had simply vanished. Eventually I was able to recall getting up and leaving when it was all over; there had been a pancake buffet, on the house, but we had elected not to stay. Of the performer's encores and farewell I could remember nothing.

It's true that I'd been drinking, but only a single bottle of Guinness, surely not enough to cause me either to fall asleep or to black out a portion of an evening I had been anticipating for years. I wondered about the state of my mind, whether this was a harbinger of worse things to come.

It was only later, with great relief, that I realized that the entire sequence of events — the ride, the concert, the gap in time — had never taken place at all. I lay in bed, enjoying the sweetness of concern dispelled, for now.