A Reader on Reading

Ambition prompted my second attempt. Every year, just before the summer holidays, the school put on a vaguely patriotic play, exemplary and dull. I decided that I could write something at least not worse than these pedagogical dramas, and one evening after dinner, I sat down and composed a play about the childhood of one of our ancient presidents, famous, like Washington, for having never told a lie. The first scene opened with the boy facing the dilemma of denouncing a playmate or lying to his parents; the second portrayed him inventing a story to protect his friend; in the third, my hero suffered the pangs of a tormented conscience; in the fourth, his loyal friend confessed to the awful crime; the fifth showed our hero repenting of his lie, thus adroitly circumventing the real dilemma. The play bore a title that had the virtue of being, if not inspiring, at least clear: Duty or Truth. It was accepted and staged, and I experienced for the first time the thrill of having the words I had written read out loud by somebody else.

I was twelve at the time, and the success of the experience prompted me to try and repeat it. I had written Duty or Truth in a few hours; in a few more hours I tried to write an imitation of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (inspired by Disney’s Fantasia); a religious drama in which Buddha, Moses, and Christ were the main protagonists; and an adaptation of “Falada, the Talking Horse,” taken from the Brothers Grimm. I finished none of them. I realized that if reading is a contented, sensuous occupation whose intensity and rhythm are agreed upon between the reader and the chosen book, writing instead is a strict, plodding, physically demanding task in which the pleasures of inspiration are all well and good, but are only what hunger and taste are to a cook: a starting point and a measuring rod, not the main occupation. Long hours, stiff joints, sore feet, cramped hands, the heat or cold of the workplace, the anguish of missing ingredients and the humiliation owing to the lack of knowhow, onions that make you cry, and sharp knives that slice your fingers are what is in store for anyone who wants to prepare a good meal or write a good book. At twelve I wasn’t willing to give over even a couple of evenings to the writing of a piece. What for? I settled comfortably back into my role as reader.

Books continued to seduce me, and I loved anything that had to do with them. During my Buenos Aires adolescence, I was lucky enough to come across a number of well-known writers. First in an English-German bookstore where I worked between school hours, and later at a small publishing company where I apprenticed as an editor, I met Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Marta Lynch, Marco Denevi, Eduardo Mallea, José Bianco, and many others. I liked the company of writers and yet I felt very shy among them. I was, of course, almost invisible to them, but from time to time one would notice me and ask: “Do you write?” My answer was always “No.” It was not that I didn’t wish, occasionally, to be like them and have my name on a book that other people would admire. It was simply that I was aware, very clearly, that nothing that I could produce would ever merit sitting on the same shelf as the books I loved. To imagine a book that I might write rubbing covers with a novel by Joseph Conrad or Franz Kafka was not only unthinkable but incongruous. Even an adolescent, in spite of all his overwhelming arrogance, has a sense of the ridiculous.

But I listened. I heard Bioy discuss the need to plot carefully the successive episodes in a story so as to know exactly where the characters are headed, and then cover the tracks, leaving only a few clues for the readers to think that they are discovering something invisible to the writer. I heard Ocampo explain why the tragedy of small things, of ordinary people, was more moving than that of complex and powerful characters. I heard Lynch speak passionately, enviously, of Chekhov, Denevi of Dino Buzzati, Mallea of Sartre and Dostoyevsky. I heard Borges break down a Kipling story into its many parts and reassemble it, like a clockmaker inspecting a precious ancient instrument. I listened to these writers tell me how the stuff that I read and loved had been made. It was like standing in a workshop and hearing the master craftsmen argue about the strongest materials, the best combinations, the tricks and devices by which something can be made to balance at a difficult angle or keep on ticking indefinitely, or about how something can be built to look impossibly slim and simple and yet hold a myriad complex springs and cogwheels. I listened not in order to learn a new craft but better to know my own.