AND YET, SINCE Guernica was destroyed in any case, we are surely no worse off for having Picasso’s rendition of that atrocity to contemplate in Madrid. If, in Ezra Pound’s bitter formulation, all that the ravages of history have left to us of classical Greece and Rome are “a gross of broken statues and a fewscore battered books,” then we are not only no worse off for having those souvenirs; we would be considerably worse off if we didn’t have them, much as we may lament what was lost of these cultures in the Christian Dark Ages, for example.
Consider the case of my compatriot Raymond Federman, an avant-garde North American writer and my former colleague at the State University of New York in Buffalo: Born in Paris to a family of modest French-Jewish tailors, Federman was destined to be apprenticed to his father’s trade; but when the Nazis invaded France, he and his family were rounded up along with most other French Jews and shipped off to the death camps. Young Raymond and some other boys in his boxcar managed to escape almost accidentally before the train crossed the border; he made his way somehow to the south of France, where he worked as a farm laborer while his family and the rest of European Jewry were being exterminated in the Holocaust. Ultimately and fortunately he got himself to the USA, where he was able to finish high school, attend Columbia University, complete a doctorate in French literature at the University of California, and become a respected American university professor and writer instead of a small-time Parisian neighborhood tailor. “So what am I supposed to do?” Raymond once asked me: “Thank Hitler?”
Well, no, of course not. If we could magically undo the Holocaust by giving up the collected works of Raymond Federman, I am quite sure that even the author would consent.4 William Faulkner, whom I’ve quoted already, once made the casually cruel remark that one poem by John Keats is worth “any number of old ladies.” One would like to have asked him, Any number? Six million, for example? Or perhaps just a mere handful, but including your own mother and grandmother? Fortunately for us, history doesn’t offer such options — at least not to most of us — and so we are free to be grateful for Raymond Federman and Anne Frank and Primo Levi without having to be grateful to Adolf Hitler. We can thank Vladimir Nabokov for his beautiful novels in English without thanking Lenin and Stalin for dispossessing him of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Muchas gracias, Pablo Picasso y Pablo Casals; no gracias necessary to the Generalissimo. And (to circle back toward my subject) I can thank Poet-Professor Pedro Salinas for leading us ignorant undergraduate gringos through Don Quijote and Lazarillo de Tormes and Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca and Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset without thanking the Loyalistas for driving Salinas into American exile.
INDEED, ON THE assumption that I have by now made my position clear enough not to be mistaken for Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, I am tempted to return to 1898, as follows: Even the United States Navy, I understand, has come virtually to admit that the explosion that sank our battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor at 9:40 PM on 15 February 1898 and killed 268 of its crew was almost certainly caused not by a Spanish anti-ship mine, but by an accidental fire in the vessel’s coal bunkers, next to its reserve gunpowder magazines. Our own distinguished Admiral Hyman Rickover, commander of the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet, came to that conclusion in his official reinvestigation of the matter in 1976; Rickover’s report (which our government in general and our Navy in particular received with loud silence) confirmed what Spanish investigators had been saying all along. But ah, my friends: If the powerful U.S. newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, along with President McKinley’s hyper-macho Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, had not seized that opportunity to whip up American war hysteria with their cry “Remember the Maine!” there would have been no Spanish-American War to deprive Spain of its last colonies in the Western Hemisphere, and hence no Generación de Noventa y Ocho, and hence perhaps a different set of historical circumstances in Spain from those that led to the Guerra Civil and Franco’s dictatorship, and hence no exile for the likes of Pedro Salinas (first in Puerto Rico, then in the USA), and hence no quietly inspiring exemplar for this particular 18-year-old Yankee fumbling his way toward a literary vocation: the first living, breathing writer of any sort, not to mention the first bona fide internationally distinguished poet, whom I had ever been in the gentle, dignified, good-humored presence of….
Voltaire’s Candide asks his friend Martin, “For what purpose was the world formed?” “To infuriate us,” Martin replies. Also, I would add, to dismay and humble us with its staggering contingencies, both general and specific: Had it not been for the anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe and the relative poverty of village life in Germany toward the end of the 19th century, my wife’s grandparents would not have immigrated to America from Minsk and Latvia and my own grandparents from Sachsen-Altenburg, and Shelly and I would not exist, much less have met each other. If not for a certain snowstorm in Boston at the end of the 1960s, we would not have re-met in romantic and happily consequential circumstances. A different sort of spontaneous combustion aboard the U.S.S. Maine in 1898 may be imagined to have led to my reading Don Quijote, en español, with Pedro Salinas in Baltimore 50 years ago and, thanks in part to that fortuitous experience, to my subsequent evolution into a novelist sufficiently attracted to things Iberian and Iberian-American to be powerfully affected by Joaquim Machado de Assis at the beginning of my career and by Jorge Luis Borges at its midpoint, and to visit Spain and Portugal (if not Brazil and Argentina) at every opportunity. Therefore, while I duly regret the death of those 268 U.S. Navy personnel aboard the Maine and the later casualties on both sides in Theodore Roosevelt’s “splendid little war,” not to mention the horrors of the Guerra Civil, it bemuses me to think of my obras todavía no completas as part of the fallout from — shall we say—el boom of 15 February 1898.
SPEAKING OF El Boom—that literary phenomenon so impressive that it prompted my comrade William H. Gass to declare not long ago that we Yanquis “no longer own the Novel; we just rent it from South America”—I must confess that although I would not go quite that far in my admiration for all those wonderful writers, it is the case that whereas Iberia (especially Spain) has been of perhaps more interest and importance to me than its contemporary literature has been, Latin-American literature from Machado de Assis to García Márquez has been, perhaps regrettably, of more interest and importance to me than have been the countries of its origin — or at least of its authors’ origins, inasmuch as a considerable percentage of El Boom was detonated in either voluntary or involuntary expatriation. Reading Cervantes with Salinas made me yearn to come to Spain as soon as possible, and as soon as possible thereafter (on my first sabbatical leave from teaching) I came, even though in 1963 el patriarca was still in his long otoño, and the scars of the Guerra Civil, both physical and human, were still quite in evidence. Reading Machado de Assis and Borges and García Márquez, on the other hand — and Allende, Cortázar, Donoso, Fuentes, Piñon, Puig, Vargas Llosa, et cetera almost ad infinitum — seems not to have inspired me with any comparable craving to visit the locales of their excellent fiction, any more than reading Franz Kafka makes me yearn for the Czech Republic or reading William Gass impels me toward the American midwest.