Although writers and intellectuals in Buenos Aires in the 1920s felt distant from both Europe and from South America itself, Buenos Aires was a cosmopolitan place where small magazines and new ideas flourished and where there was much debate about what sort of literature this new and hybrid country should produce. Although Arlt was never close to Borges, he did know another writer who came from a cultured family, the novelist Ricardo Guiraldes; he was published in Guiraldes’s magazine Proa, as was Borges. Guiraldes (1886–1927) had travelled widely, especially in France, and was opposed to the use of stilted, literary language in novels and stories.
This suited Arlt. He loved the streets of the city and its slang and had much to say about them in his novels and in the column he began writing for the newspaper El Mundo in 1928. In the 1930s he travelled widely as a journalist for El Mundo. His two best known books are the novels The Mad Toy (1926) and The Seven Madmen (1929). In these two books he attempted to find fictional form, using a mixture of the picaresque and a tone which was haunted and alienated, to capture his hero, a young man filled with a mixture of guilt and innocence, curiosity and knowingness, as he progresses from place to place.
It is possible that the first chapter of the book was written some years before the other ones, as Arlt sought to isolate his errant hero further, remove him from any group or circle, thus making his adventures all the more strange and alienating. The scene in the early pages of the book where Silvio and his companions ‘imagine that we lived in Paris, or foggy London town. We would dream in silence, a smile balanced on our condescending lips’ belongs to that world of literary young men feeling marooned in Buenos Aires, imagining the world of Europe as the real one, and locked into Argentina as though it were some kind of cage.
The only relief from life then was literature. In this world a book becomes a lethal weapon or a way of saving, or further staining, your soul which nothing else offered. Thus, even to this day, there is a something holy about a bookshop in Buenos Aires; the browsers and those who work in the shop give the impression that they are involved in some sacred ritual. A bookshop, then, is a natural place for Silvio to find and unfind himself in The Mad Toy. Baudelaire will be invoked as much as books about science and mathematics. ‘Sometimes at night I would think of the beauty with which poets made the world shake, and my heart would flood with pain, like a mouth filling with a scream.’
Arlt, the low priest of the modern, was fascinated by machinery as he was by literature and by magic and by sex. The scene with the man wearing women’s clothes would have been dynamite in the Buenos Aires of the 1920, as it remains deeply powerful to this day.
In this world only the hero is sane; much else is weird or monstrous. The day is filled with cruelty and ugliness; there are useless tasks to perform and many irritations. As in the world created by Borges, the night is more real, as is the world of dreams. The night, as invoked by words, can take on a stunning beauty, playing here a great game between shadow and substance, whose tone is quintessential to the book and endemic to its spirit:
Sometimes, at night, there are faces that appear, faces of women who wound you with the sword of sweetness. We move apart, and our soul remains shadowy and alone, as happens after a party.
Unusual apparitions… they disappear and we never hear of them again, but even so they accompany us at night, their eyes fixed on our own fixed eyes…. and we are wounded with the sword of sweetness, and imagine how the love of these women will be, these faces that enter into your own flesh. An anguished desert of the spirit, a transient luxury that is both harsh and demanding.
— Colm Tóibín, 2013
Introduction
There’s a point in the middle of the third chapter of The Mad Toy at which the reader is given for the first time the narrator’s full name: Silvio Drodman Astier. When I first read the novel, my initial reaction was to wonder if it was an anagram of the author’s real name. Of course it isn’t (no ‘B’, for starters, which is a problem if the name you’re looking for happens to be ‘Roberto’), but the impulse was excusable: one of the most immediately appealing things about Arlt’s novel is the sense it gives of being a record of events that we feel must actually have happened.
Where does this immediacy come from? In part it must derive from the way in which The Mad Toy, as is also the case with Arlt’s other novels, pins itself down firmly to a particular time and a particular place. If you take the time to look up on a map of Buenos Aires the street names Arlt mentions, you will see that most of the action of the novel takes place in a fairly small segment of a large city, the central districts of Caballito, Flores and Vélez Sársfield (where Arlt himself was born), with a couple of brief excursions to the docks and the Colegio Militar in El Palomar. For all his dreams of escape to London or Paris, dreams that are eventually only fulfilled to the extent that Silvio is offered a post in Comodoro, about 1,000 miles to the south of Buenos Aires, The Mad Toy is a local novel, alert to the detail of Silvio’s neighbourhood, the walls and alleyways, the cul-de-sacs, the milkbars, the green street lamps.
But the apparent realism of The Mad Toy serves to reveal the skill of the journalist, the professional observer of life. It is possible to be taken in by Arlt’s artistry to the extent of believing that Silvio must be an alter ego, but it is to do Arlt a disservice to think that Silvio is simply copied from life: the seemingly shapeless, picaresque nature of The Mad Toy is a grimy mask for an extremely carefully developed and formally patterned novel, in which the superficial story of Silvio’s adventures is also a detailed psychological portrait of Silvio himself. Of course, to a certain extent Silvio is inspired by Arlt: what first novel isn’t autobiographical to at least some degree? But it is more correct to say that Arlt managed to dissociate himself from the adolescent he had been, and created, with the benefit of hindsight, a fantastic version of his youth.
Arlt was born in Buenos Aires in 1900. He was the son of immigrants: his father was a Prussian, and so strict as to be perceived as unnecessarily cruel by his son; Arlt’s mother was from Trieste. Arlt had two sisters: one of them died in infancy; the other in 1936; both from tuberculosis. At the age of eight, Arlt was expelled from school, and his formal education ended. He worked at a number of jobs: he was employed for a while in a bookshop, but he was also a housepainter, a mechanic, a dock worker, a factory hand… Eventually the newspaper El Mundo employed him to write a column: his so-called Aguafuertes (‘Etchings’) of contemporary Buenos Aires formed a witty commentary on the city’s low-life. He also worked as secretary to the novelist Ricardo Güiraldes. His first novel, El juguete rabioso (The Mad Toy) was published in 1926, and was followed by Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen, 1929), Los lanzallamas (The Flamethrowers, 1931) and El amor brujo (Bewitching Love, 1932). In the 1930s Arlt began to write for the theatre, and by the end of his life was more or less exclusively a playwright. He died of a heart attack in 1942. Pieces of this biography crop up in The Mad Toy: Silvio’s sister is also called Lila and Silvio works in a bookshop for a while, but direct connections between Silvio and Roberto Arlt are few. However, there are a great number of subtextual connections, points at which Silvio can be seen as a projection of Arlt’s desires. Perhaps most significantly, as an act of revenge against his sadistic father, Arlt chooses to have Silvio’s father commit suicide: ‘my father killed himself when I was very young.’