Illegal MiniBiographies. Writers: Illegal minibiographies: Painters, Illegal minibiographies: Musicians, Illegal minibiographies: Inve

By Heberto Gamero

Sixty unique and revealing stories about some of the most famous writers in history.

What was going on in the head of Juan Rulfo when, as a travel agent, he drove along the endless roads of Mexico?
What did Hemingway say to the Italian that he was carrying on his back before giving him to the Allies and thereby saving his life?
What was the reaction of an admirer to the refusal of the Swedish Academy to award the Nobel Prize to Jorge Luis Borges?
Who brought red roses to the tomb of Oscar Wilde?
How were the last moments of Horacio Quiroga or Stefan Zweig?
Nabokov, had he ever dreamed of returning to Russia?
Sixty unique and revealing stories about some of the most famous writers in history.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Jul 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781547585144

Book preview

A life, an instant

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Totalities are deadly. The rational cares to encompass everything. Much more if the task occurs in Arts. Perhaps because for Thales water is the origin of all things and there are no hands under this heaven that can contain it. However, we all come from Homer, who in writing the Iliad and the Odyssey not only did he become the father of Western literature but also embraced in both all the written pieces of work; consequently, all authors.

Gamero is not moved by the encyclopedic attempt. It’s a long way from the calculation, the inventory, the census. This book constitutes the review of a conglomerate of names: sixty, to be exact. Six tens of names that have resonated in his wonder by the letters. Heberto Gamero animates the sweet honey of the story. The laborious game of building images, giving us the charm of not knowing where the real base ends and where the fiction begins. The result is these texts, firm, round, monolithic and at the same time open, where

a narrator of the craft loosens the hand naturally and gets the forcefulness in the autonomous world that is the short narrative.

It surprises the tact of each story. The flash that produces the connection with the selected author, turned into character. For if any ambition encourages this book is to place to all those names, most monsters of the literature, in the role of personages; of characters who love, suffer, get drunk or are isolated outside the cathedrals they built.

The formula is undeniable: A life, an instant. Sixty lives summarized in sixty moments and basted by a single voice: that of Gamero who, as a watchword, is never absent and from the bottom of each exciting story continues to mark the tone, the tessitura and the course, in the style of the faceted stone.

OSCAR MARCANO

WHEN I READ THE BOOK

When I read the book, the biography famous. And this is then, said I, what the writer calls a man’s life. And so, will someone, when I am dead and gone, write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life;

Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my

real life? Only a few hints, a few diffused, faint clues and indirections,

I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.)

WALT WHITMAN

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I’m made of paper and ink; when my soul moves it makes a crunch of diary sheets, and even when I speak my words, they come out wet, black, and they go printing the air.

E. ANDERSON IMBERT

Juan Rulfo

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1955. He was driving quietly along one of the roads in Mexico.

Two thousand copies seem very few to me, thought Juan Rulfo when he was announced the publication  of which would be his only novel: Pedro Páramo. He was thirty-eight years old and had been working on  it since before his thirties. Two thousand copies were made Insufficient for a novel which, though short, had brought him endless complications, starting with the title, which from the beginning he was not sure what  it would be: at first he had called it ‘A star next to the moon’, that is what he told his fiancée, Clara Aparicio, in a letter sent to her in 1947. Then he referred to it as ‘The murmurs’, and who knows how many titles more the Mexican considered before finally deciding, to give it the name of the main character.

While he was a traveling salesman, he used to travel for days  the  endless  Mexican  roads,   behind

the steering wheel and daydreaming, he imagined the most extravagant, impossible, distant and fantastic situations, only feasible in a mind possessed by the most astonishing fiction, by the most inconceivable madness. He dreamt that he would sell millions of books, with famous writers praising and recognizing his novel. He imagined for example Jorge Luis Borges saying things like: Pedro Páramo is one of the best novels in Spanish-language literature, and even the best of all literature. He imagined people like Álvaro Mutis telling his friends, Read that thing, damn it, in order to learn! He imagined them all, subjects of a new kingdom where aristocrats and plebeians bowed before the new king of universal literature. That is why two thousand copies seemed to him frankly insufficient. His imagination had no limits. He came to the point of imagining writers of the stature of Susan Sontag saying things like: Not only is the novel of Rulfo one of the masterpieces of the twentieth-century world literature, but also one of the most influential books of this century. What a great dreamer he was, what an anesthetic effect that of a road that never ends, a mirage that hypnotizes and creates illusions. Rulfo even saw, as clearly as he saw the dead people of his novel, the Nobel Laureates, people like Garcia Márquez, saying such sublime follies as: "That night I could not sleep while I finished the second reading. Never, since the tremendous night I read the Metamorphosis of Kafka in a dismal student pension in Bogotá —almost ten years ago— had I suffered such a shock" Rulfo’s fantasy stretched beyond the horizon, much more, beyond the sunlight and the farthest stars. He no longer remembered sadly the murder of his father when he

was only six years old, nor the loss of his mother four years later nor the years with his grandmother or those he spent at the orphanage in Guadalajara, all that had already been left behind... But, two thousand copies, he murmured between dream and dream, between fantasy and fantasy, they are very few, they will be exhausted in one day, in half a day, in an hour, perhaps in minutes. They will be insufficient for so many people, repeated incessantly as drummed with his fingers on the steering wheel and a pleasant smile made jerks on his face. He even thought that his short and local novel, where he had tried that the fantastic and the real walked hand in hand with the naturalness of two who love each other, it would be translated (for goodness’ sake) into Polish, French, English, Italian, German... and more outlandish as Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish... Not content with all this he thought of the movies. He imagined Emilio Fernandez, known as Indio Fernandez by everybody, asking scripts for the movies, making adaptations, departing with directors and first-line actors. And the prizes. What prizes can be obtained with just a short novel and a book of seventeen folk tales which served him to develop his novel? Maybe none... But what if he could receive the National Prize of Literature of  his country, or the prince of Asturias of Spain? Ah, something great... So how were they going to print two thousand copies?

A few months later a brief review of the novel Pedro Páramo of John Rulfo, was published in the newspaper. It concluded: The edition was of two thousand copies, of which half were sold, the rest were given away.

Ernest Hemingway

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Near him a wounded soldier complained: God, God...

Hemingway legs were bleeding. He took a bandage and firmly pressed one of his battered knees (the other could resist a little more). He struggled to get off the Red Cross ambulance he had been driving until some projectiles made him lose control. He looked far away, his hand as a visor, his eyes almost closed by the fiery July sun, the cannons of the Austrian artillery made soil fall as rain on his helmet and uniform. He watched the wounded man. He seemed in a bad state. He cried out for God as if he were a friend to whom ask for a favor. Beyond, perhaps about forty yards, was the Allied trench where they would be safe.

God...

He crawled up to him, fearing he could not stand up. The soldier thought perhaps that God had heard

his pleas and clung to Hemingway’s arm with all the strength he had left. He rose a bit to see him better.  He wasn’t Italian like him. By his appearance, tall  and burly, it could be English or American. Then he released him, relaxed his body and closed his eyes. His breathing was fast and hasty.

No, Hemingway told him, giving him a couple of slaps on his face, you must stay awake. We have a chance if we get to the trench.

The soldier opened and closed his eyes as if that were all the effort he could make.

Hemingway stood up, leaning on his healthier leg. On his youthful face, dirty and sweaty, the wrinkles of an old man betrayed the face of pain. He bent down towards the wounded man, with both hands took him by the chest belts, held his breath and lift him up in one go ―for a second two terrible cries silenced the fire of the cannons―, he passed the wounded arm above his shoulders and fastened him tightly round the waist. The soldier could hardly stand up on the ground.

Come on, we gotta get to that trench. It’s not far. They’ll help us there. I can see our own men from here.

And they started the tour. Every step looked like a kilometer.

Friend?

He had no answer. Friend?

The soldier, in one of the wobbles of his head, gave a glance at his savior. Between wheezes and gasps Hemingway said:

You know, I’m an American, from Illinois. I like war. I was a little disappointed when they discovered that flaw in my eye. I would have preferred to be in the front line, fighting, not driving an ambulance... Now I see that there is not much difference: here one also risks life.

Every now and then the soldier slipped a little and the Red Cross officer pulled him hard by the arm and the belt and carried him back on his shoulders. The white cloth that bandaged his knee seemed now a wet patch, almost black, that was slowly swelling.

Friend? God, God...

"My father was a doctor. But he loved hunting and fishing. We had a cottage in the country, near a lake. He taught me how to fish. Since I was a child, I had my own fishing rod and caught some large fish... He also taught me to hunt..., with a carbine. Mom instead was a music lover. I was a little interested in the cello. I learned to play it at school, there in Oak Park... now I remember... Friend? he cried; he could hear his breathing, broken and sibilant. I never got to be a genius or anything like that. But you know what, I was part of the orchestra. That’s right: member of the Oak Park and River Forest High School Orchestra, a name that could impress anyone, don’t ya think? I did many things at that time: water polo, rugby and whenever we could improvise a boxing ring, we punched one another as champions. I kissed the canvas more than once. Ah, what a time... I didn’t go to college. I disappointed my father with the university and my mother with the music. I couldn’t help it.  Something called me: The World,  life, adventure,

who knows, who... who can know..."

The sun was beating down over their heads. The roar of the bombs seemed to fade away.

Friend?

One more step and they will reach the  trench.  One more step and the Red Cross driver would lose consciousness and fall with his heavy burden in the arms of the Allied forces. He is not Italian, the wounded soldier repeated... God.

Marcel Proust

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He is lying on the bed, slightly leaning towards the wooden headboard slat, panting and writing. Three shirts, gloves, bib, scarf, thick pajamas and socks, the window closed, and the stove burning are not enough to mitigate the cold that gets under the blanket and his clothes as if it were a polar wind. Every few minutes a flurry of tremors prevents him from controlling the pen and scribbles the sheet where he writes and then cross it out and restart the word. Despite the tremors, spasms, the fever that does not give him an instant of truce and of the incessant cough, Proust continues to write.

Suddenly he stops, he looks towards the clothes that are being heated near the stove and murmurs: How does the Duke of Sagan wear his monocle? Which eye sees least, the left or the right? We were at the Ritz Hotel, one very close to the other, but I don’t remember, I don’t remember on which eye he was wearing his monocle. I seem to have seen him using it in both eyes alternatively. Maybe he is not sick of any of his eyes and he only wears

it to be fashionable... In that case the lens would have no correction. It is probable that, as wealthy as he was, he had it made without correction, yes, to be fashionable and, along with his hat, the bow tie and tuxedo, to honor the nobility to which he belongs... Now, is his gadget the type of metal ring that fits the orbit of the eye and has a chain that is attached to the waistcoat so that it is not lost, or is it one of the most elaborated one whose frame comes with a gallery or extension to be able to move away from the eye at will and so do not rub it with eyelashes? Is it one of those monocles without a frame?: The single piece of glass with the closed edge so that it is better fastened and to which sometimes it is made a hole by where a cord is inserted in order that if it falls it does not break, which, depending on the length of that cord, will prevent the small lens from falling into the soup or part of the exquisite stew we eat? Something that can perfectly happen when you put it on and impress yourself with an unusual comment or unexpected news. What I have no doubt is that the Duke’s monocle was custom made, what gigantic eyes he has. Is it uncomfortable? It doesn’t seem so: he puts it on and removes it with great agility and elegance and, depending on which hand he uses in the gesture, raises the right or left little finger while laughing as if he were the king of the party. Sometimes he keeps it for a long time and when the joke, if it is the case, deserves a laugh or a sudden movement of head, it is removed just before being thrown back, always with the little finger stretched.

A coughing access distracted him from his reflections. The cold, the fever, the sweat, the tremors and the convulsions seem to dispute a prey too weak, too

wounded to defend itself. Now, urged to take advantage until the last minute that remains of life, he remembers the lost time, his childhood truncated by asthma, reading almost converted into his only amusement, the youth wasted in halls, gatherings, parties, theatres; until he was thirty-five, he did not deal with anything else but seeing the world with the superficiality that can be seen by an idle, an unsuccessful bohemian, a young man of a few unimportant writings coming from a rich crib without apparently major concerns or claims other than having a good time with others like him, rich without a trade. He earned the approval of the others by means of gifts and his figure was one more, an almost indispensable vase that decorated the banquets and the meetings of the French high society. But there was something curious in his proceeding. Perhaps to cope with his insomnia or to forget the sickness that would take him to the grave, every night during those fifteen years of parties, when he got home, he wrote pages and pages of everything he had seen: the way a lady held her hair with her comb or the way she had evaded the gaze of an impertinent interlocutor, the way the man of the monocle gestured, the times the other lit a cigar or the quantity of glasses that had been taken. For