YANKEE REDUX — HOW I NEVER MET SORIANO

 

This year is the 26^th anniversary of the death of Osvaldo Soriano, one of Argentina’s most celebrated contemporary writers. This is a rewrite of something I wrote about him in 2008, when I first created this blog. Actually, it’s the re-edited story of how, oddly enough, our paths never crossed in the exciting and violent Buenos Aires of the 1970s or later on when democracy returned. But it’s also about how, through his work and reputation, I got to know him all the same.

 

Funny thing, I’ve often thought, how I never met Osvaldo Soriano. We were colleagues, contemporaries pretty much (he was born six years before me), and we haunted some of the same environments in the bad old days leading up to the 1976 military coup in Argentina. Our turf back then were streets where hookers, sailors, printers and newsmen were about the only people stirring long into the wee hours of the night. And we started hanging out in those places in the same era, he having come to Buenos Aires from the Argentine interior and I from abroad.

I suspect we both got into journalism for the same reason, as a way of writing every day and earning a living at it. He did it all his life, despite his fame as a novelist, becoming one of the original founders of the controversial daily, Página 12, when he returned to Buenos Aires from European exile. There—there being Paris—he had written for such noted publications as Le Monde, Libération and Il Manifesto.

Some people go into journalism because they have a passion for the news. Others because they like telling people’s stories. These others are the ones people talk about when they say they never met a journalist who wasn’t writing a novel. In Soriano’s case it paid off big-time. From what I know about him—I became a huge fan of his from the very outset—I figure his enormous popularity surprised no one as much as himself. His novels have sold into the millions of copies (you can even buy them at Walmart!) and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. And still the more asinine among critics are wont to discuss whether he was, in fact, a “good writer”. What was it Hemingway said? Something like, “Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.” Soriano probably would have agreed.

Argentine journalist and author Osvaldo Soriano

Anyway, at about the time that Soriano was writing for owner/editor Jacobo Timerman at La Opinión, I was sub-editing and reporting for editor Robert Cox at the Buenos Aires Herald. Our editorial departments were more or less around the corner from each other in the then-red light district, in the vicinity of 25 de Mayo and Tucumán. Both of our papers printed at Alemann & Compañía, which was handy and one of the biggest printers of the day. It was a location that was a stone’s throw from the SAFICO Building on Corrientes and San Martín, where major international news agencies and correspondents had their offices, a few short blocks from the local agency Noticias Argentinas, and walking distance from the press offices of all major municipal and federal government departments and ministries.

Back then, it was hard to go into any of the bars or cafés in that district without meeting up with a colleague or two. So you would have thought that Soriano and I would have been almost bound to run into each other. But, as fate would have it, we didn’t. It was hard not to run into novelist, journalist, one-time radical Peronist and later fat-cat diplomat Jorge Asís, for instance. Asís was a sort of politically aggressive omnipresence on that circuit. But Soriano was, from what I hear, a somewhat retiring if friendly sort, and I was never really much of a joiner myself. I suppose we both spent a lot more time in front of a typewriter than some, even in the days before computers made it easier still to become a functional hermit.

Dan Newland, circa 1977, Buenos Aires Herald
reporter/editor and correspondent for the London
Daily Telegraph, World Environment Report and
ABC Radio News, New York.
Photo:John Claude Fernandes

I stayed on at the Herald while working as a stringer for papers and magazines in the United States and Britain, and thus started building a career of sorts. It wasn’t on purpose. I mean, the ultimate goal was to become a novelist. It was just that, in the meantime, I was limited to the Herald if I wanted to write in my own language, and besides, once the military junta shut down La Opinión and locked up Timerman, there was basically no other place but the Herald to write a semblance of truth about what was happening in Argentina. The times grew frighteningly interesting and one year just kind of led to the next.

Soriano, for his part, graced the pages of not only La Opinión, but also of Primera Plana, Noticias, Confirmado and Panorama with his inimitable prose. But his leftist bent and his uncompromising objectivity made it dangerous for him to remain in Argentina after the 1976 coup d’état, and he made a decision to live in exile until the military returned to their barracks in 1983. He was off to Belgium and would later gravitate to Paris, where he would co-found Sin Censura with venerated Argentine exile and author Julio Cortázar.

At the Herald, our news editor and my immediate boss, Andrew Graham-Yooll, made a similar decision at about that same time and was off to London practically overnight. I got bumped up the ladder to the news editor’s post and former McLean’s Magazine journalist James Neilson was brought in as associate editor under Cox.

It was in this editorial management post that I started to get a chance to write regularly under a by-line and thus to become mildly well-known in certain circles. So it was too that I got to know Soriano for the first time, without ever actually meeting him.

It happened one midnight (dreary) in 1978, as I was sitting at my desk, struggling with the first lines of an op-ed piece while waiting for the press to roll in our new installations on Calle Azopardo. Momentarily stymied, I decided to procrastinate by going through the day’s mail that was still piled untouched on the corner of my desk. I found the usual readers’ letters (which I dutifully separated and filed for future publication), some magazines, a few brochures (from merchants who wanted some free hype and which I put in the out tray for the advertising department), a couple of formal invitations to lunches and cocktails and, finally, a small rectangular package, the size of a book. It was addressed to my name in black marker, postmarked from Spain, had no return address and was wrapped in plain brown paper, as if to conceal some pornographic content.

Justifiably paranoid as I was in those days, given the constant threats the newspaper received, I sniffed the package, flexed it, shook it, picked at it, and tweaked it a bit, before finally deciding it was probably harmless. When I opened it, what I found was a rather thin little paperback book with a title as Argentine as tango itself: No habrá más penas ni olvido. So Argentine is that phrase from the classic tango, Mi Buenos Aires querido, that it is almost impossible to translate it correctly. I mean, one could try, say, No More Sorrow or Forgetfulness, or No More Sorrow or Oblivion, but what the devil does that mean in English. It is only within the context of porteño lore—of immigrants far from home, of families separated by destiny and longing to be together once more, of perennial hope against a backdrop of barely veiled despair, of terminal melancholy turned outwardly to false cheer, of romantic abandon and unrequited love, of vengeance and remorse, of arrivals and departures, of European Americans with heartstrings stretched taut between continents—that those words make sense, even in Spanish. They would probably make sense in Italian…if they were spoken in America (especially South America). But in English, it’s like: Huh? Anyway, as a title for what was to be an incredibly succinct and immortal synthesis of something as Argentine as the phenomenon of Peronism in the 1970s, it could not have been more fitting.

I scanned the first few paragraphs and was immediately, irretrievably hooked. I kept telling myself, “One more page and back to the op-ed piece…One more page and I’ll go down to put the paper to bed…One more page and I’ll put this thing down! But it was impossible. It wasn’t until I felt the rotary press shaking the floor of my office like a small, benign earth tremor that I tore myself away from the plot and characters that peopled the story to go down and do my duty, plucking a copy of the latest edition of the Herald from the downstream end of the press and having a quick general look to make sure everything was okay before bidding the press crew good night over the din of the machinery.

Arriving home in our tiny mid-town condo at nearly two-thirty in the morning, I took up where I’d left off in the book while I ate the supper my wife had left out on the kitchen counter for me and had a glass of wine. But when I’d eaten my meal, I poured myself some more wine and kept right on reading. By the time I fell into bed around dawn, I’d read half of the book, and before I went in to work the next afternoon, I had finished it.

I was spellbound. Political analysts of all colors and nationalities were straining their intellects to the point of mental hernia to try and paint a clear if complex picture of the Argentine phenomenon. They were seeking some even vaguely objective definition of Peronism, attempting to explain in some feasible way what had gone so horrendously wrong that the country had stumbled headlong into total chaos, only to fall into the gnashing jaws of unbridled repression and ironclad authoritarianism. And by and large, they had failed miserably.

But here was Osvaldo Soriano, high school drop-out, street-beat newsman and natural genius, who created the perfect allegory. He didn’t try to tell the story from the standpoint of the big picture, where cloak and dagger political intrigue made it next to impossible to get to the core of truth. Instead he took the demise of Peronism as Perón had defined it to a tiny town in Buenos Aires Province, where everybody knew everybody else. Into that microcosm, he injected the poison of political avarice, added the catalyst of petty jealousy, sowed the seeds of gossip and doubt, and fanned the flames of a witch-hunt that would turn a quaint and even comic village into a tragic nightmare of civil strife, torture, revolt and murder.

Thanks to this incredible portrait of the Peronist phenomenon following the death of populist strongman General Juan Domingo Perón, the question of what happened in Argentina in the nineteen-seventies becomes graphically crystal-clear, with never a mention of any of the major players, except, of course, for the all-pervading, omnipresent name of Perón.

But even though the story could not have been more Argentine in every sense, it was, I realized, also brilliantly universal. As universal, say, as Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Huxley’s Brave New World, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was an allegory on politics gone awry, a regime’s running rampant, movements placing themselves above the people in whose name they acted and above systems that sought to guarantee the rule of law. It was about an ideal turned caricature, a political thought gone psychotic. It was about human foible—complacence playing into the hands of dictatorial design, rebellion providing an excuse for free-wheeling repression and about what happens when two extremes come full circle and see each other in near mirror image. It was about how no one wins, but how power is retained, at least for a time, by whomever swings the biggest club. But it was also about how moral victory can only belong to those who maintain their principles at all costs, even at the cost of their very lives.

The next day I told a guy I knew in the shop about the book. He was what one might call a closet Peronist revolutionary. He had been, rumor had it, a leftist activist before the 1976 coup. He and I often discussed politics while putting the paper to bed. He had read a lot and I asked if he had ever read anything by Soriano, since this was my first encounter with the author. He said he didn’t think so. Would I lend him the book to read?

“Sure,” I said, “but I want it back.”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’m a fast reader.”

The next night when I went down to the shop and said hello to him, he grunted, glanced over both shoulders to see if anybody was watching, reached into a dark little cupboard, where he also hid his little brown bottle of Bols Ginebra and retrieved the book from the darkest recesses. I couldn’t help laughing aloud when I saw that he had very carefully covered it in heavy black plastic sheeting, obviously to keep the title from showing through.

“Here, jefe,” he said. “Get it out of here.”

“You didn’t like it?” I laughed.

“It was great,” he whispered, “but not worth dying for.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

“You know the security guy at the front desk? He said that if I didn’t want the milicos to "give me a ride in their truck", I’d better get that subversive book under wraps, because the author was a terrorist and the book was banned.”

I lost that copy of No habrá más penas ni olvido in a move some time back, but for all of the years that it remained in my library, right up to the beginning of the nineties, it wore that black shroud. That cover, like the book itself, was a symbol of those times and of the exile from which Soriano so aptly described them.

I recently came across a picture of me when I was a news editor and foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires in the seventies and one of Soriano when he was exiled in Paris. I couldn’t help but reflect that the historical phenomenon that had forced him to flee for his life from the country he loved was the exact same one that had inspired me to remain in the Buenos Aires that he had left behind. We had both chosen to become expats because of the same thing, but for opposite reasons. Just one of the ironies of dangerous times.  

Soriano in Paris

In the early nineteen-nineties, several years after I quit my post as managing editor of the Herald and went free-lance, I had the honor and pleasure of sharing an office in Buenos Aires with a brilliant journalist and writer by the name of Claudio Iván Remeseira. We did a lot of talking, mostly about fiction and writing, when we should have been working for a living, and in the course of those conversations, Soriano’s name came up. I ended up telling Claudio the story about how Soriano’s work first came into my hands. He thought it was a great story and that a guy like Soriano would probably like to hear it. I said that chasing after a big name like Soriano (he was indeed big by then) seemed so sophomoric and unprofessional. He would surely think I was a jerk.

Years later, when I had already moved from Buenos Aires to Patagonia, and when Remeseira was about to pursue his own brand of self-imposed exile in New York, he again approached me on the subject, saying he had told my story to a guy who sort of knew Soriano and the fellow had said he was sure Osvaldo would be delighted to hear it. I said I’d think about it, because to me, hermit that I tend to be, it just seemed like a too extroverted, off-the-wall thing to do. But Remeseira managed to get me Soriano’s home phone number and made me promise that the next time I was in Buenos Aires I would give the best-selling author a call.

And I did, repeatedly, always getting an answering machine with the voice of Soriano’s French-born wife on it. Some time later, I met up with Remeseira in Buenos Aires and casually mentioned over drinks that I’d tried Soriano on numerous occasions but none of my calls had been returned.

“Haven’t you heard?” he asked. “Soriano’s got lung cancer. He’s only seeing a few close friends. They don’t think he’s going to make it.”

Even this seemed like another of his universal images, a passage from his last book, Piratas, fantasmas y dinosaurios (Pirates, Ghosts and Dinosaurs), the book’s first image, in fact, where he writes: “Every New Year’s Eve, I remember, if only for an instant, the last one my father was alive. He was wrapped up in a threadbare robe, on the doorstep of the house he rented in Santo Tomé. There was still a butt between his lips, but by now it was killing him. He raised his arm to wave good-bye to me as firecrackers and colorful roman candles burst around him. We had quarreled, I think, because I hated the holiday season as much as he did and couldn’t figure out what stupid custom made us get together to toast one another and wish each other things in which neither of us believed...”

It seemed to me a universal portrait. His father’s. My own father’s, some years later when he was dying of that same disease and I couldn’t help hating myself for having quarreled with him so often. Perhaps it is, in a way, a scene from the lives of nearly every father and son. And, in the end, a self-portrait as well.

That, I realized, was the universal genius of this author, whose life had run parallel to mine for a time, and whom I would never know.

 

CAN I SAY THAT?

 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pernicious nature of censorship. That’s not unusual for a writer and former journalist. Actually, there’s no such thing as a “former journalist”. It’s like “when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way…” Once you’re initiated into the gang, once you have ink running in your veins, you’re addicted for life. But what I mean is that people in my craft and trade are probably more aware of the dangers of censorship than a lot of other people who aren’t constantly dealing with it are. That said, however, it’s an issue that affects us all to a greater or lesser degree, whether we’re aware of it or not.

I remember the first time I heard the word. It was in a cartoon of World War II vintage, black and white. Can’t recall now exactly what the cartoon was about or which cartoon characters were in it, but at one point, one of them was furious, face flushed and steam coming out of his ears, and all of the sudden, the cartoonist slapped a sign over his mouth—black background, white letters—that read “CENSORED”. I asked my mother, Reba Mae, what censored meant and she explained that it was like, during the war, when there were certain things that were secret and the government marked them as “censored” and covered them up (good choice of words).

I didn’t really get it. I’m sure my mother did, because she worked in a defense plant that built Army tanks throughout the war, and for part of that time she was a supervisor. It was a hard concept to explain, though, especially to a grade-schooler. But at least I now had a vague idea of what it meant. Namely, it was somebody else, some authority, telling you what you could and couldn’t say or know.

It was also Reba Mae, however, who first imbued in me the right to know. She didn’t do this in any aggressive, hands-on way, but mostly by introducing us kids to the public library and always leaving the many books she bought and read—besides the ones she regularly checked out of the library—at the disposal of my sister, brother and me. I remember being ten, perhaps, and finding a new book on her bookshelf that she had just received from one of several book clubs she belonged to.

The hardback book by Noel B. Gerson was titled The Conqueror’s Wife, which seemed intriguing. And the illustration on the dustcover was even more so for a boy of my age, since it depicted a dashing soldier in breastplate and chain mail, the dragon of St. George emblazoned on his vest, holding his broadsword high. A lovely damsel all cloaked in white stood just behind him, while all around, battle scenes raged.

I recall carefully taking the book down from the living room bookcase and thumbing through the front matter to the first page of the story. I can still see the print of the first line on the page which read, “Father, I will not marry a bastard.” I was galvanized for a second. I mean Whitie, my dad, said bastard all the time—to describe a rusty bolt that refused to budge, or a door that was swollen shut or open, or the car when it refused to start on cold mornings, or even some other man whose behavior he disdained. But we kids weren’t allowed to use it anywhere within earshot of our mother, and I certainly had no idea you could actually write the word in a book. It was a revelation. And The Conqueror’s Wife was the first adult literature I ever read.

Turned out “bastard” was actually the main character’s middle name, so to speak.  He was William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy. And the lady in question was the fair and clever Lady Matilda, daughter of the richest nobleman in Christendom. When they do indeed marry, it is a marriage fraught with will, passion and unbridled dual ambition in which each tries to control both the kingdom and each other.

In all the years that I was growing up, Reba Mae never asked me where such-and-such a book of hers was, never told me not to touch them, never tried to set rules for which ones were off-limits. So, I was quite often reading well beyond my age group. By my high school years, I’d read books by Conrad, Michener, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Harold Robbins, Pearl Buck, Grace Metalious, Harper Lee, Jacqueline Susann, Salinger, Orwell, Pasternak, Graham Greene, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams and many more books and authors for adult readers. And, as soon as I was making a little money, I was buying books of my own as well, including among other titles, the entire series if Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. I read these and others in addition to voraciously delving into the “outside reading” lists that hopeful English teachers gave us in school, and whatever the Auglaize County Library’s chief librarian—and my mother’s friend—Louise Miller recommended.

It seemed natural to me to read whatever I wanted. Which was why my first experience with censorship was shocking and hurtful. It happened in my senior English class. The teacher, one of the older ones on the faculty, was someone I admired and who was teaching whoever wanted to listen a great deal about journaling, essays, literature and good writing in general. I suspected that she was a frustrated writer herself, who was teaching school more to make a living than anything else. But no matter what her motives were, she knew what she was talking about and how to teach it.

Henry Miller with muse Brenda Venus

If I had gone through school up to then with the nagging thought that “if they ever find out what an idiot I really am, I’m toast,” in her class I felt for the first time a kind of confidence I’d seldom had before, and I was basking in the sensation that, finally, I was beginning to really grasp the art of writing that I could develop from here on. So I had no qualms, when discussing some point or other in one of her classes, about quoting what I considered to be a legitimate example of what I was talking about, and that just happened to be written by Henry Miller.

I should hasten to say that whatever passage I was quoting from wasn’t one of the more lascivious ones that Miller was wont to write—and which he wrote so incredibly well—but one of the ones in which the writer waxes philosophical and sometimes floors the reader with the unfettered truth of his observations. But I had no more than gotten the name of whom I was quoting out when the teacher interrupted me, said, “I wouldn’t know, Dan, because my mother doesn’t think I’m old enough to read Henry Miller,” and called on someone else, thereby managing to insult not only me, but also my mother and one of my favorite writers, besides basically telling me to shut up.

In all fairness to her, I should have known better. Miller had been banned in the United States until six or seven years before, which was why the New York-born author first published his books in Paris. And a lot of people in small-town Ohio figured he should have stayed banned. But I just didn’t understand it. I found censorship not only offensive and invasive but also just plain stupid.

Were people so ignorant, malleable and impressionable that reading a book was going to corrupt their minds forever? Was listening to an idea that challenged “what they’d always believed” going to brainwash them? Didn’t they possess the critical thinking to discern between what they agreed with and what they didn’t, or were they like weather vanes that just turned whichever way the wind was blowing? More to the point, wasn’t banning books and burning them precisely what Hitler had done in Germany in order to impose the stances of the Third Reich as the one and only truth, while supporting a Hitlerian philosophy known as The Big Lie?  And wasn’t that exactly the sort of authoritarianism our fathers had sacrificed so much to defeat in the war that had just ended less than twenty-five years before?

What were people afraid of? Other than maybe learning something they’d never known before, vicariously visiting places they’d otherwise never see, finding out about other lifestyles, or hearing ideas and even just words that challenged them to think about their own, what did anybody have to lose from someone else telling their stories? Moreover, if you were afraid to read something, afraid it might shock you, afraid it might corrupt you, or afraid it might change your mind about things you’d already decided you didn’t want to change your mind about, why read it? Nobody was forcing you to. But who were you to say what I could and couldn’t read? What authority had the right to “protect me from myself” according to its own subjective criteria regarding what was “acceptable” and what wasn’t?

So, these questions have plagued and inspired me since high school. And, as a journalist starting in my mid-twenties, anti-censorship became a major principle of my professional credo.

These beliefs were, parallel to my own in the late-1960s and 1970s, also a main trend in the revolutionary pop movement that took shape around the world. My generation, the baby boomers (born 1946 to 1964), emerging in the wake of World War II, struggled, in reality, to uphold the lessons that the war preached but didn’t always practice. We questioned government intervention in our private lives, societal strictures that ostracized rugged individualism, repressive laws that were legal but not legitimate, and religious judgments that infringed on secular rights and freedoms. We rebelled, in short, against “how things had always been” and demanded the sea-change that the horrors of the worst war in history had promised—including world peace—but was failing to deliver.

The war wasn’t supposed to be simply about defeating the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany. It was about defeating authoritarianism, or in other words, about defending not only the rights of European and other nations to self-determination, but also about defending the liberty espoused in democratic philosophy—the rights of the individual and the freedom of each to choose his or her own beliefs and destiny. It was about being able to express your thoughts and ideas freely and openly, to ascribe to whatever political beliefs and creed you chose without fear of repression, and to be able to debate those thoughts and ideas in an atmosphere of mutual curiosity and understanding. It was also about every race, creed and ethnicity being held in equal respect and esteem.

The boomers were, then, the generation that bucked the system, refused to do what we had to do, wear what we had to wear, think what we had to think and believe what we had to believe. Some more than others—certainly many more than myself—had the courage to take that cultural revolution to its ultimate consequences, to burn their draft cards and brassieres, to challenge puritanical dictates, to demonstrate by the thousands, to fight for their rights and the rights of others, to oppose round two of political witch-hunts following the tragedies of the McCarthy Era, and to resurrect writers, cultures and philosophers from the past who spoke to their current concerns. It was the era of flower power, of free love, of hippy culture, as well as of underground revolutionary movements bent on claiming the civil rights and individual freedoms espoused in theory but all too often ignored in practice by the Establishment. It was a time in which the cultural shift was truly toward the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as promised in our Constitution. And it was the era in which many writers previously banned in my native United States came into their own.      

At some point, however, we became fat, middle-aged and middle-class. We started caring more about “our things” than about our beliefs, and one day, in our thirties or forties or fifties, most of us looked into the mirror and realized that we were the Establishment. Or perhaps we didn’t, but if not, we were wrong.

I’ve been thinking about these things, as I say because the mess the world is in right now, and hardly anywhere more than in my own country, keeps me awake nights. The natural environment that we became so aware of in the sixties and seventies is in crisis—the world is on fire and melting fast. Worse still, we are less united than ever before, with political extremism and social tribalism wreaking havoc and with democracy falling out of style, while authoritarianism is becoming as popular as it was in the run-up to World War II but in totally new and surprising places like the United States. And this includes attempts to suppress ideas and thought, to disguise the truth and to censor dissent. Books are being banned and burned once more, but again, not just in the worst dictatorships on earth, but in my own native land, which was once thought of as a shining example of democracy and the rule of law.

Perhaps it would be easier to ignore all of this and carry on with life as if nothing alarming were happening. It would be, that is, if it weren’t for the advantage, or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it, of my having lived it all in my own flesh. The fact is, that I made my bones as a writer and journalist under a harsh and bloody authoritarian regime. And I had the good luck of being part of something remarkable: the resistance of one editor and one newspaper and one small staff that refused to accept the devastating reality of a tyrannical regime as being inevitable and unchallengeable.

I possess the direct practical knowledge, then, that each voice can make a difference, change minds, alter outcomes, even if only a tiny bit at a time. That developing unity of purpose among many can change a negative tide fueled by an autocratic elite. I know how vitally important it is to defend, far beyond your own comfort zone, the rights of others, to resist oppression, to ignore threats, to tell the story of what’s going on when no one else is telling it or paying attention, to contravene censorship by any and all means. Because censorship (and the big lies that it enables), violence, the suspension of the rule of law, and the restriction of individual rights and freedoms are the primary tools of authoritarianism, which always comes disguised as the solution to “a failing democracy.”

That also means that I have the sad advantage of knowing first-hand the results of accepting the notion that “democracy isn’t working” and that it is no longer worth defending, that it is—in theory and eventually in fact—in need of overthrow. I know what the tragic outcome is when a free society embraces that idea. Believe me, you don’t want to know…but if you value your freedom, you should.