Review: Barry Yourgrau on Virgilio Piñera
Author of wildly fanciful, joyously grotesque stories, poet, novelist, insatiably polemical critic, literary provocateur whose work blasted modernism into Cuba’s stultified theater
Virgilio Piñera
Last year a writer journalist I know, one with a Cuban mother, read some of the brief surrealish fiction I traffic in and said he was reminded of Virgilio Piñera.
Virgilio who?
So I’ve learned of Virgilio Piñera, who died in 1979 age sixty-seven, a pioneering and masterly practitioner of the absurd and surreal in Cuba and Latin America. And not only the author, most strikingly, of wildly fanciful, joyously grotesque stories, but also a poet, novelist, insatiably polemical critic, literary provocateur, and a seminal playwright whose work blasted modernism into Cuba’s stultified theater. A graphomane who “lived to write, lived for writing,” in the words of Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
And whose biography is a wrenching, tragic story itself. His career struggled, rose, and briefly soared, then collapsed into harrowing obscurity under Castro, whom he’d initially applauded. Redemption was only posthumous.
“I found three fairly dirty qualities,” Piñera wrote about his youth. “of which I would never be able to clean myself: I learned that I was poor, that I was homosexual, and that I liked art.” To be an open, effeminate, art-loving queer in the machista Cuba of his times was a ticket to perpetual ordeal.
Piñera was born in Matanzas province, moved to Havana in 1937, studied philosophy and letters at university, and started in on writing, including his attention-getting iconoclastic poem, “La isla en peso” (The Weight of the Island), an anti-romantic evocation of Cuba’s reality. In 1946, he left the stifling constrictions of Havana’s literary scene for Buenos Aires, where he would spent most of the next twelve years. There he fell in with fellow provocateur/ambitious foreigner Witold Gombrowicz. He shepherded the proper Spanish translation of Gombrowicz’s sublimely mocking Ferdydurke (revising the author’s imperfect draft) and collaborated in its bombastic (though ineffectual) promotion. Borges admired his fiction, helped publish him in the prestigious journal, Sur, and with coeditor Adolfo Bioy Cesares added Piñera’s micro-tale, “En el insomnio,” to the 1955 anthology, Cuentos breves y extraordinarios (Short and Extraordinary Tales). This despite the incorrigible Piñera having included Borges in a critical swipe at his host country’s writers (for being only “tantalizing”). In 1948 his play, Electra Garrigó, an absurdist anti-bourgeois retelling of the Greek classic set in Cuba, brought the unwelcome shock of modernity to the island’s theater. In 1952 his major novel, Rene’s Flesh, published in Argentina, proffered a wildly disturbing, de Sadian exploration of carnality (he was one of the first Latin American writers to seriously appraise Sade, who he claimed was misunderstood and should be taught at schools). In 1956, his story collection, Cold Tales, appeared—a triumph, drawing raves from Buenos Aires’s literati for its originality. “Finally, after ten years,” Piñera trumpeted to a friend, “they realize what a guest they’ve been dealing with.”
In late 1958 he returned to Havana for good. New Year’s Day 1959, Castro and company marched in.
Piñera embraced the Revolution, embraced the liberation of culture and free expression. He became the father-figure columnist (as “The Writer”) at the government-backed newspaper Revolución and then its widely read cultural supplement, Lunes de Revolución, edited by the pun-mad Cabrera Infante. In 1960 the visiting Sartre and Beauvoir were electrified by a staging of Electra Garrigó and wanted to bring it to Paris.
Then came June 1961, after the Bay of Pigs attempted invasion. Castro delivered his warning “Words to the Intellectuals” to assembled writers: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.” From the audience Piñera shakily confessed aloud that he was “frightened.” Expression, he understood, was no longer to be free or freewheeling. That October the Night of the Three Ps cracked down on prostitutes, pimps, and pederasts. Piñera was arrested, only released through the intervention of Cabrera Infante and others. Traumatized, his bungalow out at the beach searched, he moved into a cramped little place in Havana, where he lived henceforth in perpetual fear of rearrest. Lunes de Revolución was closed. In 1964, Che Guevara saw a work of Piñera’s in the Cuban embassy library in Algiers and hurled it against the wall, shouting “How dare you have in our embassy a book by this foul faggot!” The author and his kind (and others) did not meet the requirements of a single-minded manly Revolutionary man. In 1965, Cabrera Infante and his puns decamped to London, but fearful Piñera stayed on, even though queers were being rounded up in camps. In 1968 his play, Dos Viejos Panicos (Two Old Panicked People), did receive Cuba’s prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize—tellingly featuring a longtime husband and wife who stay together out of fear. But its staging wasn’t allowed. In 1971 his books were censored. Until his death in 1979, he was a literary nonperson … a frightened graphomanic phantom.
A decade later began Piñera’s rediscovery, slowly expanding into a Piñera renaissance. By 2009 Leonardo Padura, perhaps Cuba’s most internationally prominent author, was hailing him as, among other things, “an important figure among the nation’s most significant and daring narrators”—one whose life became “the best representation of the torture of marginalization.” By 2012 Cuba was celebrating Piñera’s centennial with an official cultural Año Virgiliano. (Ten years later Cuba legalized same-sex marriage.)
And it was in Piñera’s short stories, Padura contended, where his literary “renovating spirit” was “sharpest.”
So: Cold Tales. Its forty-four inventions, most of them brief or very brief, carry hilarious/dark suggestions of Borges, Gombrowicz, Kafka, Sade, not to mention the astoundingly strange Raymond Roussel, beloved of Surrealists and John Ashbery’s New York School crowd. There’s even a touch of Monty Python avant la lettre. One of my favorites is the opening and earliest story, “The Fall,” where two roped climbers plunge off a mountainside, their fall involving acrobatic midair maneuvering to protect each other’s handsomeness (!) as their body parts fly off, their maneuvering charged with oddball physical intimacy (homoerotic?), all described in earnest detail. In “The Actaeon Case,” two other gents, who’ve just met on the street, reenact, with courteous but feverish clawing, the hunter Actaeon being devoured by his dogs after having been turned into a stag by angry Diana, discoursing all the while on the myth in sprays of saliva. (The homoerotics here seem decorously clear.) Going gastro, “Meat” is a sprightly Swiftian satire where a town solves its meat shortage (common in Cuba) by deliciously butchering themselves up into nothingness; “A Few Children” features a genteel married couple who like to dine on infants now and then as a treat; “A Few Beers” features an enormous glass vat of beer as a preposterous and torturous murder instrument.
I do have my quibbles. “Insomnia,” for instance, which Borges and Bioy Casares put in their anthology, seems pretty slight; while other high-concept ones like the shortie “Swimming,” touting swimming on dry land—often cited online—were at times shallow. Sometimes longer ones were congested, claustrophobic, or a bit confusing.
But sly, grotesque marvels abound in Cold Air and deserve to be celebrated as major. The closing brief Borgesian story, “The Death of the Birds,” offers a poignant avowal of literature … especially poignant for being written by the disappeared graphomane in 1979.
Mark Schafer’s very capable 1987 translation, long out of print, will be reissued, expanded by him, sometime next year by New York Review Books, along with his out of print translation of Rene’s Flesh. I politely can’t wait.
Barry Yourgrau’s books of brief fiction include Wearing Dad’s Head, A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, The Sadness of Sex (in whose film version he appeared) and Haunted Traveler, as well as a memoir, Mess. He is the only American author who has published short fiction on Japanese cellphones (keitai shosetsu).
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