A Reader on Reading

Then, by chance, because of an unanswered question, my attitude towards writing changed. (I’ve told the story in another essay included here, “In Memoriam.”) A friend who had gone into exile during the military dictatorship in Argentina revealed to me that one of my high school teachers, someone who had been essential in fostering my love of literature, had willingly denounced his students to the military police, knowing that they would be taken and tortured and sometimes killed. This was the teacher who had spoken to us of Kafka, of Ray Bradbury, of the murder of Polyxena (I can still hear his voice when I read the lines) in the medieval Spanish romance that begins

A la qu’el sol se ponía

en una playa desierta,

yo que salía de Troya

por una sangrienta puerta,

delante los pies de Pirro

vide a Polyxena muerta …

After the revelation, I was left with the impossibility of deciding whether to deny the worth of his teaching or close my eyes to the evil of his actions, or (this seemed impossible) to grasp the monstrous combination of both, alive in the same person. To give a shape to my question I wrote a novel, News from a Foreign Country Came.

From what I’ve heard, most writers know from a very early age that they will write. Something of themselves reflected in the outside world, in the way others see them or the way they see themselves lending words to daily objects, tells them they are writers, like something tells their friends that they are veterinarians or pilots. Something convinces them that they are chosen for this particular task and that when they grow up their name will be stamped on the cover of a book, like a pilgrim’s badge. I think something told me I was to be a reader. The encounter with my exiled friend happened in 1988; it was therefore not till I turned forty that the notion of becoming a writer appeared to me as firmly possible. Forty is a time of change, of retrieving from ancient cupboards whatever we have left behind, packed away in the dark, and of facing its latent forces.

My intention was clear. That the result wasn’t successful doesn’t change the nature of my purpose. Now, at last, I wanted to write. I wanted to write a novel. I wanted to write a novel that would put into words — literary words, words like the ones that made up the books on my shelves, incandescent words—what seemed to me impossible to be spoken. I tried. In between my bread-and-butter jobs, early in the morning or late at night, in hotel rooms and in cafés when an assignment forced me to travel, I cobbled together the story of a man of two natures, or of a single divided nature. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, read during one terrified night when I was thirteen, was never far from my thoughts. I felt desperate for a long chunk of time to work continuously on my novel, so as not to lose the pace, the sequence, the logic, and, above all, the rhythm. I convinced myself that I could recapture the thread after days or weeks of interruption. I pretended that the lack of concentration didn’t matter and that I’d be able to pick up where I’d left off, just as I’d pick up a story I was reading at the place where I’d left my bookmark. I was wrong, but lack of uninterrupted time was not the only reason for my failure. The lessons from the masters during my adolescence seemed to be now almost useless. A few scenes worked. The novel didn’t.

There was a lack of craft. Readers can tell when a sentence works or doesn’t, when it breathes and rises and falls to the beat of its own sense, or when it lies stiff as if embalmed. Readers who turn to writing can recognize this too, but they can never explain it. The most writers can do is learn the rules of grammar and spelling, and the art of reading. Beyond this, whatever excellence they may achieve will be the result of simply doing what they are trying to learn, learning to write by writing, in a beautiful vicious circle that illuminates itself at each new turn. “There are three rules for writing a good book,” said Somerset Maugham. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”