“Neruda, Reyes, Paz; Washington, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Paris, Geneva; Cervantes, Balzac, Rimbaud, Thomas Mann: only with all the shared languages, those of my places and friends and masters, was I able to approach the fire of literature and ask it for a few sparks.”
So goes the conclusion of the lead essay by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) in his 1988 collection, “Myself With Others.” That summary of places and names in “How I Started to Write” reflects but some of the currents that coursed always warm-bloodedly through Fuentes’s ever-restless intellectual life and the works of imagination that he regarded as its pinnacle.
Son of a Mexican diplomat who was serving in Panama City at the time of his birth, Fuentes spent his formative years aged 6-12 in Washington D.C., where his father served as ambassador.
“I grew up in the vibrant world of the American thirties, more or less between the inauguration of Citizen Roosevelt and the interdiction of Citizen Kane. When I arrived here, Dick Tracy had just met Tess Truehart. As I left, Clark Kent was meeting Lois Lane. You are what you eat. You are also the comics you peruse as a child.”
Subsequent stints in Santiago (Chile) and Buenos Aires (Argentina) preceded Fuentes landing back in his ancestral home of Mexico at age 15, which he eventually claimed as very much his own. Not, however, without his intellectual sensibilities forever stamped with the cosmopolitanism of his boyhood postings through his father.
Was Fuentes perhaps grafting his adult memory of America onto the impressions of the child he was? No doubt to a degree, but let us not underestimate just how powerful the impressionistic world is to a child, how much more they intuitively know and feel than they can possibly put into analyses and the words they require.
Little wonder that he haunted the world of European and other of the world’s great capitals throughout his life, absorbing them into a body of work that included the 25 novels that are most tied to his international reputation. Atop that accomplishment stands dozens of short stories, essays, literary criticism and plays.
One of his novels, “The Old Gringo,” became a Hollywood movie in 1989 that starred Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda, but the word from critics (I haven’t seen the movie myself) seems to reflect the near universal truism of, “Just stick with the book.”
Witty, urbane, astonishingly well-read and unafraid of politics and immersion in other cultures, Fuentes wrangled himself an appointment as Mexico’s Ambassador to France from 1975-77. (Of course, France! Where else?)
But for all his internationalism and intense devotion to the affairs of a Latin America that he originally viewed as an outsider after his early-life romance with America, it is his commentary on America that stands out almost chillingly today in this seminal essay on his formation as a writer.
It’s rare to come across even-handed but critically acute analyses of what America represents to the outside world, made all the more insightful when the analyst formed a good deal of his character from early immersion in American culture without ultimately being claimed by it.
And these nearly 40 years later, “How I Started to Write” has left us with plenty enough to ponder about how America has been writing and rewriting itself in recent years.
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“As a young Mexican growing up in the U.S., I had a primary impression of a nation of boundless energy, imagination, and the will to confront and solve the great social issues of the times without blinking or looking for scapegoats. It was the impression of a country identified with its own highest principles: political democracy, economic well-being, and faith in its human resources, especially in that most precious of all capital, the renewable wealth of education and research.”
That’s the long historical view of America as symbol to the free world, Lady Liberty’s torch extended for the people of all nations to dream of its glow. (In the current climate, that “renewable wealth of education and research” line is surely enough to make Fuentes and his angels weep.)
Was Fuentes perhaps grafting his adult memory of America onto the impressions of the child he was? No doubt to a degree, but let us not underestimate just how powerful the impressionistic world is to a child, how much more they intuitively know and feel than they can possibly put into analyses and the words they require.
In stark contrast, he writes of the Mexican history his father required him to read as preparation for the family’s eventual return:
“A cruel fantasy: the history of Mexico was a history of crushing defeats, whereas I lived in a world, that of my D.C. public school, which celebrated victories, one victory after another, from Yorktown to New Orleans to Chapultepec to Appomattox to San Juan Hill to Belleau Wood: had this nation never known defeat?”
As virtually American at the time, Fuentes was studious and personable enough to get on well with his classmates, striving as most humans do to identify with a tribe from where so many blessings can flow. “I was popular, I was ‘regular,’” he writes:
“Until a day in March—March 18, 1938. On that day, a man from another world, the imaginary country of my childhood, the President of Mexico, Lazaro Cardenas, nationalized the holdings of foreign oil companies. The headlines in the North American press denounced the ‘communist’ government of Mexico and its ‘red’ president; they demanded the invasion of Mexico in the sacred name of private property, and Mexicans, under international boycott, were invited to drink their oil.
“Instantly, surprisingly, I became a pariah in my school. Cold shoulders, aggressive stares, epithets, and sometimes blows. Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency.”
That social, politically infused rejection forced a shift in Fuentes’s perception of the world. This was the other America, the other world, really—of venality and tribal exclusion, of bloviating politicians’ jingoism that disruptive events allow them to spout with such cruel, mindless abandon.
And of course, of American capitalist muscle, flexing its way into shaping the world.
It was all a long way from what Fuentes had ingested of America earlier in that decade, when “Franklin Roosevelt taught us to believe that the first thing was for the United States to show that it was capable of living up to its ideals.”
Fast forward to 1973, long after Fuentes had “discovered that my father’s country was real but more fantastic than any imaginary land,” and that America was not above the frailty of betraying its ideals and portraying it as strength. Referring to the CIA-backed coup in 1968 that brought down Chile’s duly elected government of Salvador Allende, Fuentes writes:
“I learned in Chile that Spanish could be the language of free men. I was also to learn in my lifetime, in Chile in 1973, the fragility of both our language and our freedom when Richard Nixon, unable to destroy American democracy, merrily helped to destroy Chilean democracy, the same thing Leonid Brezhnev had done in Czechoslovakia.”
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Chastened by experience but never lapsing into cynicism, Fuentes continued his love affair with culture and literature, falling under the spell of Mexican writer, philosopher, and, holding true to form, diplomat Alfonso Reyes, who according to Fuentes,
“…championed the maximalist, all-assimilating, encyclopedic approach of Cervantes and Diderot. Another of his models is Erasmus, the Renaissance scholar who did so much to spread a universal humanist culture in the sixteenth century.”
Funny how those two words “universal” and “humanist” seem to fit together as an inseparable pair, the first clearly implying the second in most every circumstance.. To hold fast to universal values unpinched by dogmas and fanaticisms, leavened by both calm rationalism and unbounded imagination, is to move from primitive to modern man, aware of but no longer ruled by animal instinct, fear and aggression.
Fuentes became the man and the writer he turned out to be by fully embracing the humanist culture he was privileged to have presented and modeled for him by his father, Reyes, and the scores of intellectual and literary giants he was exposed to in one form or other during a particularly robust era in human history. His truly universal, internationalist ethos, built on a mother lode of direct experience, always tilted toward more: more questions, more curiosity, more exposure, more learning, more travels in both body and mind.
More imagination in appreciating the strangeness of the human condition, the strangeness of the self and the other, and all that it calls us to feel, understand, and do.
“My upbringing taught me that cultures are not isolated, and perish when deprived of contact with what is different and challenging. Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other. No culture, I believed unconsciously ever since then, and quite consciously today, retains its identity in isolation; identity is attained in contact, in contrast, in breakthrough.”
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In a nice bit of internationalist symmetry, a much younger (2007) Gustavo Dudamel (Venezuela) conducts the Berlin Philharmonic in a brief (12-minute) piece by the modernist Mexican composer Carlos Chávez entitled “Sinfonía India.” The piece hearkens back to indigenous melodies and ancient percussion as Chávez, like Fuentes, reckons with folding his contemporary Mexican identity in with the past.
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The full text (20 pages) of “How I Started to Write” is available in pdf format here.
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Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing.
Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for library books) grace the rotating banner top of homepage. https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Fuentes Portrait courtesy of Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Fuentes
Chicago cityscape by Thomas Hawk, San Francisco, California https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/
San Miguel de Estrella by Vibe Adventures https://unsplash.com/@vibeadventures
You couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate conclusion to your Carlos Fuentes blog than Carlos Chavez’s Sinfonia India. This symphony, composed ninety-years ago, earned international acclaim after its initial debut and hasn’t lost a step since. Its sound, so rich in the rhythms and instrumentation of his native Mexican culture, remains one of the most requested symphonies on the classical repertoire. It’s the companion to Carlos Fuentes’ words.
The United States is a great nation, but it has an ugly underbelly. America is Janus, the two-faced Roaman deity. For every snowcapped Denali there’s a white hooded Stone Mountain. For every Thurgood Marshall there’s a Roger Taney. For every Gettysburg there’s a Wounded Knee. For every Louis Armstrong trumpet there’s an AR-15. For every Yosemite there’s a Manzanar. For every Scottsboro Boy trial there’s a Scopes trial. Carlos Fuentes saw both faces. His America in the 1930s was that of a child caught up in the wonder of DC, both city and comic book. Almost overnight, this innocent and vibrant view of our nation dulled, shed its glitter, as childhood friends morphed into enemies. Hate erased the good.
A century before Fuentes lived in Washington, French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled throughout the United States and his Democracy in America described a vibrant, though tortured, American landscape. He identified this nation’s Revolution as the seminal event in the Age of Enlightenment. He praised this nation’s growth into a revered democracy for most of its people. Yet, he fully understood that even Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Isn’t that what our history has been? A march from Lincoln to Trump.
Beautiful piece of prose, Robert, nutshelling the broad sweep of our history in all its outsized—because we have been so outsized in our influence—glories and contradictions. The major question you leave us with now being: “From Lincoln to Trump, and then where???”