Roberto Bolaño: Los detectives salvajes (1998)Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives & the eternal avant-garde
Mexico City, July 1982:
Someone had to call Ulises’s mother, I mean it was the least we could do, but Jacinto didn’t have the heart to tell her that her son had disappeared in Nicaragua … just like Ambrose Bierce … and Pushkin, except that in Pushkin’s case his wife … was Reality, the Frenchman who killed Pushkin was the Contras, the snows of St. Petersburg were the empty spaces Ulises Lima left in his wake, his lethargy, I mean, and his laziness and lack of common sense, and the seconds in the duel were Mexican Poetry or Latin American Poetry, which … were silent witness to the death of one of the best poets of our day.– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives [1]
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Auckland, April 2006:
Dear Leicester,
Not that I suppose you’ve been missing it exactly, but I thought you might like to hear some old-fashioned, Auckland-style literary goss about a few of your old friends.
So there we all were in the little Art Gallery in Northcote: comfy sofas, cushions, tables of wine and cheese. The plan was that we should each read for five minutes, then have an interval with music, then read again for another five minutes, then there would be an open mike (necessary to get funding for the gig, apparently).
In shambles Donald, just before the readings begin. He looks a bit pasty to me, and has obviously had quite a bit to drink. He asks if I can give his magazine Bread a bit of a puff. I say of course, but suggest that he read something himself later on in the open mike (I’m quite keen on some of the poems he’s been writing recently). He likes the idea, and goes off to get some copies of the mag from Craig’s car, which is parked nearby.
Meanwhile the reading begins: read read read, yawn yawn yawn. Then the interval. I talk to Craig, who says he hasn’t seen Donald for quite some time, since he went off to look in the car, in fact, and is a little worried about him (‘He was popping anti-depressants in the car, and he’s been drinking all day, and he was in hospital this morning with some cuts he’d made on himself’). Ah.
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Mexico City, May 1977:
Our visceral realist activities after Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano left: automatic writing, exquisite corpses, … masturbatory writing (we wrote with the right hand and masturbated with the left, or vice versa if we were left-handed), madrigals, poem-novels, sonnets always ending with the same word, three-word messages written on walls (‘This is it,’ ‘Laura, my love,’ etc.), outrageous diaries, mail-poetry, projective verse, conversational poetry, antipoetry, … poems in hard-boiled prose … parables, fables, theatre of the absurd, pop art, haikus, … Bloody poetry (three deaths at least), pornographic poetry (heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, with no relation to the poet’s personal preference) … We even put out a magazine … We kept moving … We kept moving … We did what we could … But nothing turned out right.– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives [2]
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The reading recommences. The first two do their sets, the third begins … I’m standing to one side when in comes Donald. He does have copies of the latest Bread, but seems very unsteady on his feet. He comes up to me and asks if he can read. I suggest that I’d better do it for him, as he doesn’t look like he’s in very good shape. We’re just discussing the matter when he starts to fall over, unfortunately on the bare feet of the wife of one of the more senior poets present, who is sitting right next to me.
‘You just stood on my feet! I have a bad toe!’
‘Sorry,’ mutters Donald, ‘Bad knee …’
At this point he starts to go over again, and I grab him to try and steady him.
Suddenly the senior poet is on the scene. ‘You just stood on my wife’s foot! You should get out of here!’
Donald protests, organisers start to cluster round.
‘This is a paid event … You have to leave …’
‘I’ve paid already,’ says Donald, ‘I don’t see why I should leave …’
The senior poet seizes him and starts to thrust him towards the door. Donald resists. Others start to join in. ‘What’s going on?’ says Hilda, as her interminably dull reading about an alcoholic failing to resist the booze meanders on …
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Mexico City, November 1975:
The night before … Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn’t say so.
Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet, Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer, Borges was philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Ruben Dario was a freak, in fact the queen freak, the prototypical freak.
In our language, of course, he clarified. ‘In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous.’
– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives [3]
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The senior poet (to do him justice) is clearly experienced in such matters and by now has Donald all the way to the door. Jack stands there like a stuffed dummy thinking how unnecessary this all is and wishing they’d stop fighting with one another. Craig and the friend he came with are trying to drag Donald away. Various impotent attempts at a fist-fight between Donald and the senior poet. Shouts, curses … Suddenly a wine glass comes flying through the door (presumably thrown by Donald) and detonates in the middle of the floor, luckily touching no-one.
‘Shut the doors!’ shouts my colleague Myra. ‘That way they can’t get back in …’
By now the Mayor of Northcote, who used to be a cop, has got involved. The organisers are ringing the police. The senior poet and various other bystanders come back in. Calm settles in again, as Hilda’s dreary reading continues (she’s started again at the beginning, lest we should have missed any of her words of wisdom).
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Mexico City, November 1975:
At Don Crispin’s request, I talked to him about visceral realism. After he’d made a few observations like ‘realism is never visceral,’ ‘the visceral belongs to the oneiric world,’ … which I found rather disconcerting, he theorized that we underprivileged youth were left with no alternative but the literary avant-garde. I asked him what exactly he meant by underprivileged ... But then I thought about the tenement room Rosario was sharing with me and I wasn’t so sure he was wrong. The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispin, is that in the end people always turn into bastards.– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives [4]
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The senior poet’s as happy as a dog with two tails. ‘Didn’t think I still had it in me … He was soft … took mercy on him, but I could have dropped him easily with a single punch …’ etc. etc. to anyone who’ll listen.
Hoping that Donald & Craig & co. have pissed off and driven away, I do my bit of the reading, though the audience has thinned considerably (and understandably) by this time. The broken glass is mopped up, (relative) peace is restored …
And now the cops come driving up. ‘Why have they brought them back here?’ asks Myra. Waves of rumour come and go among those of us who are still hanging around. It seems that the mayor pursued the malefactors in his car with a cellphone, directing the cops where to intercept them, an event which finally took place in the park at Stokes Point.
Craig (as he tells me later) elected to take the heat while Donald and an even drunker member of the group took off to hide under the piles of the Harbour Bridge.
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The review … tried to sum up the [writer]’s personality in a few words:
Intelligence: average.
Character: epileptic.
Scholarship: sloppy.
Storytelling ability: chaotic.
Prosody: chaotic.
– Roberto Bolaño, 2666 [5]
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By now the organisers appear to have worked out that it’s my friends who’ve been causing all the ruckus, so I think it best to leave before the cops can start questioning me and demanding addresses. On the way out, though, I encounter Craig. The cops simply let him go, as he hadn’t really done anything wrong. They seem pretty bored with the whole business, in fact. The irony is that nothing would have happened if the Mayor hadn’t happened to be there, and hadn’t happened to be an ex-cop …
But now comes the clincher. I write to the organisers next day apologising for the disruption of their event in such a non-North Shore sort of way. They reply pretty graciously that it wasn’t my fault, and I suppose it wasn’t, though I do feel a bit bad about it nevertheless. And then in comes Myra (this is in the office, at work).
We giggle. ‘Well, that went well …’ I say (I’d invited all my students, though luckily none of them came – just the usual culture-vultures).
‘So,’ she asks, ‘What’s all this stuff about [she names the senior poet]?’
‘What stuff?’ I reply. ‘All I remember is him skiting about what a hard man he still is.’
‘I’ve just been hearing that those friends of yours told the cops that he’d been molesting young girls … including a Czech girl at the uni who complained about him.’
At this I remember an earlier part of the evening, just after the senior poet had started to read, when a voice outside the hall (obviously Donald’s) had shouted something about ‘fondling the buttocks of young girls’ … I assumed at the time that it was just him being drunk and disorderly, as in the days when he used to write abusive letters to people (the editor of Poetry NZ most prominent among them).
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There was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist … who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick … and A Christmas Carol over … The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.– Roberto Bolaño, 2666 [6]
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The cops, Myra continues, had seemed quite concerned about it – as if nowadays no such accusation can be dismissed readily as baseless for fear of later repercussions.
So it begins to look as if, rather than simply getting a bit the worse for wear and being thrown out of a venue (as happens to some of our mutual friends most nights of their lives), Donald actually came to Northcote with the intention of confronting the senior poet.
Kind of sickens you a bit with the ‘literary life,’ though, doesn’t it? The voice of a writer droning on about the imaginary dilemmas of her alcoholic character, while a real alcoholic character (which is what I’m beginning to fear Donald may be) is brawling and disintegrating under all of our noses.
And yet (though it seems rather unlikely when I read over the dreary chronicle of events) there was something irresistibly amusing about the whole thing: the senior poet’s complete and utter glee at having proved himself in combat in defence of his lady (‘You missed all the excitement!’ as he shouted to Myra when she came sidling up); the looks on the faces of some of the Northcote ladies – poets unfettered just a bit too close for comfort … Hilda picking up the gossip a mile a minute …
No-one was hurt and nothing got damaged (funnily enough, far more glasses were broken by people knocking them over with their elbows than the one destroyed by Donald), but I do feel bad for the organisers and the gallery-owners. They put a lot of work into the whole thing.
Most of the poetry that was read was (predictably) dreadful, but that’s not a mortal sin either. Tell me if you’d like to hear more of this sort of thing, or if you’re relieved not to have to hear about the mad antics of your writerly friends … I just thought it might amuse you, but now that I look at it I guess it’s not all that funny after all.
It’s certainly a reading that will go down in North Shore history, though.
Lots of love from
Jack
Notes:
[1] Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives. 1st ed. 1998. Trans. Natasha Wimmer, 2007 (London: Picador, 2009), 321.
[2] Bolaño, Savage Detectives, 196.
[3] Bolaño, Savage Detectives, 72.
[4] Bolaño, Savage Detectives, 101-2.
[5] Roberto Bolaño, 2666. 1st ed. 2004. Trans. Natasha Wimmer, 2008 (London: Picador., 2009), 27-28.
[6] Bolaño, 2666, 227.
David Eggleton, ed.: Landfall 230 (2015)[11-17/11/2014]
[2205 words]
[Published in Landfall 230 (November 2015): 89-96;
Ghost Stories (Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019): 53-60.]
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