Literature, politics, gossip and rage: the letters of Vargas Llosa and García Márquez show the other side of the ‘boom’

Also edited by four researchers (Carlos Aguirre, Gerald Martin, Javier Munguía and Augusto Wong Campos) “The Letters of the Boom” gives an account of their distinguishable personalities but united by an inalienable ambition to write total novels, a lucid reflection and political action and a unbridled literary “pachanga”. At the beginning, the writers are around 30 years old, although Cortázar is somewhat older. The first letter dates from November 16, 1955, and a young Fuentes, still a law student at UNAM, wrote to Julio Cortázar, then a little-known author who had lived in Paris for 4 years. He asks her for a collaboration for the Mexican Literature Magazine, which he then directed. This letter opens other mailboxes, and shortly after we will have four Latin American writers discovering that Latin America is a common territory, as Cortazar describes in a letter to Carlos Fuentes in 1966: “Deep down, we are not that far from each other in Latin America. When push comes to shove, we all find ourselves imprisoned in the same police station or drunk in the same cafe or getting frustrated with different similarities. Believe me, a good porteño quickly understands a good Mexican and vice versa. We are all screwed by similar things and our battles, I’m talking about books, paintings, loves, are analogous.”

Four friends comment on and celebrate their books, recognizing themselves as special and summoned to the mission of modernizing their literary tradition. As we enter the prodigious decade of the 60s, the letters will bear witness to how this avant-garde delivered books of great international impact. With an Adamic vision, they aspire to refound the literature of their countries with the same passion with which the Cuban Revolution aspired to do so on a political level. However, as the intrigues of the Castro regime begin to have a stronger presence, the tone changes. Literary discussions begin to lose steam. Words are careful, afraid of generating misunderstandings. Vargas Llosa and Fuentes are determined to object to Castroism. GGM and Cortazar show reluctance. And after the known breakup, the exchange will be much more spaced. As a moving finale, two months before his death, Carlos Fuentes wrote a last letter, on March 14, 2012, addressed to García Márquez: “Dear Gabriel: Congratulations on your 85th! To think that we met half a century ago! Our lives are inseparable. I thank you for your great books. Your friend, Carlos Fuentes.”

Accompanied by political scientist Alberto Vergara, historian Carlos Aguirre participated in the presentation of the book last Wednesday at the El Virrey bookstore. There, the researcher gave an account of the collective work that this search demanded over almost four years in archives. They managed to record 207 letters, and it is clear that many others were lost. “Cortázar and García Márquez did not save many. Carlos Fuentes and Vargas Llosa kept everything”, commented Aguirre, who investigated the documentary collections of the latter preserved in the vaults of Princeton University. “There are literary, political, personal themes, gossip and, of course, anger in the letters. A lot of camaraderie. Sometimes it seems that these four authors were writing without realizing what they were doing with those letters. At other times it is noticeable that they have a certain awareness of their importance. They even joke about it: “Save this letter so you can sell it to Harvard later.”“Fuentes wrote to García Márquez,” he commented.

In the presentation, Vergara highlighted how extraordinary it is to have these letters of enormous documentary value. And he allowed himself to joke about it. “Today these four writers would have a WhatsApp group. And I dread imagining them exchanging Julio Iglesias memes instead of writing these letters.“, he claimed. But beyond the joke, it is clear that current historians will find it difficult to put together projects of this type, because in times of social networks, the materiality to reconstruct the past will be absent. As Augusto Wong Campos, co-editor of the book, told El Comercio, even in the 1960s many archives were already lost due to lack of resources on the part of their authors or due to political persecution. “The current writer who communicates on WhatsApp to discuss literature probably does not deserve to be studied from that angle in the future, but only from the books he published. We are then speaking from a position of exception: The Boom Letters is a miracle that could only be performed once, perhaps, because it was not and could not be planned, and because today the consciousness of posterity that these authors possess is perhaps more scarce than ever. hadn,” he explains.

When letters are literature

Influenced by the Caribbean spirit of García Márquez, the word “pachanga” often marks the dialogue between the four writers. However, there is also a lot of natural rhythm and spontaneity in this “improvisation”, literary rather than musical, suggested by these texts. This is what he says Augusto Wong Campos, for whom we could consider them improvised texts, but in the sense of musical “impromptu.” Many of these letters have the quality of essays, that is, they transcend the anecdotal and are literature. The book is the equivalent of having these four “compadres” in the living room of the house, comfortable and laughing, and above all, discussing vigorously about literature and their societies. “It was known that they were friends, that they were part of the same promotion, but it is the first time that from their own lyrics one can witness the dynamics of those relationships at the very moment in which they occurred,” he says.

―“Keep this letter so that you can later sell it to Harvard,” Fuentes tells García Márquez. Do you think that at some point the authors themselves realized that with these letters they were weaving a collective thought?

Fuentes and Vargas Llosa were convinced that these letters should not be lost, that they were transcendent material, unlike Cortázar and García Márquez who considered it part of their private lives. Therefore, at some point they lost or destroyed these materials. (The five volumes of Cortázar’s letters published in 2012 exist not thanks to the Argentine but to the senders who preserved what he wrote to them). Cortázar and García Márquez exist epistolary thanks to the collecting mania of those other two compadres. It is known that one of Vargas Llosa’s favorite books is Flaubert’s correspondence while he was writing Madame Bovary. “The Boom Letters,” in that sense, are, among other things, the story of García Márquez while he was writing “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” told by himself to three of those colleagues whom he even quotes in that novel. Let us not forget that “One Hundred Years” is considered the culmination of a series of novels, and from what is seen in the letters it was also the culmination of a series of readings and conversations between these authors.

―Read today, it is evident that this “compadres party” also has the bias of the masculine vision typical of the time. Women appear in this case only as wives. Only the Argentine writer and critic Marta Traba would seem like someone with a stake in this world, even if she seems unfriendly to them. How do you see the role of women in these dialogues?

The differences with Traba, like those they had with Elena Garro, were literary in one case and ideological in another; there was no sexual or other type of marginalization. We must not forget that these four authors come from underdeveloped societies where their literary work is in itself considered marginal, as it still is, and that gave them an awareness of what the pending demands were, political and cultural. Those who could best defend these authors of machismo are contemporary writers who were their friends and allies: Alejandra Pizarnik and Cristina Peri Rossi to Cortázar, Elena Poniatowska (and even Elena Garro) to Fuentes, Meira Delmar and Albalucía Ángel to Gabo or Blanca Varela and Beatriz de Moura to Vargas Llosa.

―Between Cortázar and García Márquez there is almost no record of dialogue. Speculating, how much more do you think the texts of two writers who decided not to break with Castroism would contribute to this “epistolary novel”?

Any new letter that appears from both authors will always be welcome (in fact, if you’ll allow me the warning, I would like to ask that THEY ARE WANTED), since García Márquez stopped communicating by letter after the 70s and Cortázar has 5 volumes of letters that are a of the masterpieces of Latin American literature, and of which these Cartas del Boom would be like a sixth volume. Fortunately, both authors have left enough testimonies in the form of journalism or essays about their political opinions, not always as monolithic as one might think, and which will, I hope, deserve greater understanding and criticism now that Castroism is a thing of the past. What should never be overlooked is that their political commitment was always in good faith and that often the 4 authors would have been better off remaining silent or remaining indifferent or abstaining. The participation they had led to headaches but they decided to use their literary power to participate in their societies, with the discrepancies between themselves that are described in the book.

―You have the privileged perspective of having edited these letters in your own handwriting. Beyond its content, what could you say about the personalities of these four authors, captured in their own handwriting?

An overwhelming majority of letters are typewritten letters. When they became more sophisticated, some began to use electric machines. But regarding the ones written in his own handwriting, I am not at all a specialist in the field so I can only respond as an amateur: his letters are perfectly understood but only Cortázar and García Márquez would have passed Palmer’s course with honors.

Cited letters

From MVLL to Carlos Fuentes (1964)

“I was in horrible Lima for only 10 days, since the trip to the jungle that was supposed to last a week lasted three due to bad weather. In Peru everything is bad. Lima has been invaded by jobless Indians. Beggars crowd the streets. Everything is corrupted, politics, people, the air. The solution, chez nous, is through the Apocalypse (…) Peru is horror. One day it will rain fire, but from the earth to the sky.”

From Julio Cortázar to MVLL (1969)

“To think that we were talking about Arguedas in London, you remember, and that he was already dead. Curiously, after what you had told me about him, the news did not surprise me too much, since Arguedas repeated in his last message what you had guessed about his stagnation. But none of this alters the great misfortune that is his death, and instead proves to what extent he lived and lived for his work, to the point of killing himself faced with the impossibility of continuing it.

From García Márquez to MVLL (1968)

“Maybe I feel less pessimistic than you, in general, because I am fatalistic: Nixon cannot be worse than Johnson, Brezhnev cannot be worse than Stalin, the Peruvian military cannot be worse than Belaúnde, nothing can be worse than nothing in this shitty world, and with absolute certainty our next novels will be better than the last ones. So I don’t see why we have to commit suicide now if we didn’t do it last year.”

From Sources to MVLL

“Poor little Arguedas (my son: you will only be a good writer if you have been devoured by fleas or the romanticism of misery) resurrects, at this point, the quarrel between “Indianism” and “cosmopolitanism.” But everything was to be expected. The painful thing, the truly painful thing, is what happens in Cuba.”