“It is likely that the best synthesis of who José Donoso was was drafted by Donoso himself when he chose the words that would go on his tombstone in the lovely cemetery of Zapallar, where he now rests: ‘José Donoso: escritor.’ José Donoso: writer.”
I rang the doorbell at his house on Galvarino Gallardo street, in Providencia, at five o’clock in the afternoon. I did not know José Donoso personally, but after a dogged pursuit via telephone, I had convinced him to agree to an interview. I was waiting at the door as if it were five o’clock everywhere; as if, in the words of García Lorca’s beautiful verse, it were “five on all the clocks in the afternoon shadows.” I am about to enter the home of a writer who, like none other, has given shape to the shadow we all carry inside, I thought as I heard, from inside, the sound of persistent barking.
“Hello,” a cordial man greeted me, more hunched than I had imagined, slow-moving as though he were elderly, but with a sharpness to his gaze as if he were younger than his chronological age. He had on a red sweater of fine cashmere. A bit of dandruff on his shoulders somewhat diminished his elegance.
The subject of my interview was particularly pleasant and disposed to answer my questions, albeit always hesitantly, as if his voice were blind and he had to rummage around for his ideas. His sentences ended with an upward inflection, as if everything, for him, were a question. “You know?” Years later, reading his diaries, I realized this was much more than a conversation style: it was also his writing method. “Regarding James’s Notebooks: the sensation, which I find unsatisfactory, of a lack of hesitation. One does not see him working, or sees him working only in a very external sense. (…) He wastes neither his time nor his energy, and he never makes mistakes. Perhaps because my own experience of making literature is so different, these Notebooks are, perhaps, the most disappointing and unsatisfactory product of Henry James,”1 he writes in one of his notebooks.
For José Donoso, being a writer is not a condition; it is a process, a defeat against which one must fight on a daily basis. During a dry spell, when words and characters seemed to have abandoned him, he wrote desperately in another notebook: “I like failure in no one, much less in myself, and failure is not lack of money or impact but something else, that which I feel every morning when I sit down to write and find I cannot do it, going in circles, running in place. The opposite of failure is not success but vigor, literary potency.”2
***
Donoso recalls how, as a child, one of his favorite activities was to accompany his father to the tailor’s. “He had these movable mirrors, and by standing between the mirror’s two wings and moving the wings the right way, I could get my little frame to multiply infinitely, and I would see a gallery of unanimous Pepes, in step with one another, who stretched out until the eye could no longer make sense of optical phenomena.”3 This is an anecdote, but it is also a sort of statement of principles. Something like the abstract that goes along with an essay. A summary of his life.
How many José Donosos really existed? It is tempting to come up with a list: the descendant of a fine Talca bloodline, the Anglophile, the homosexual, the boom writer, the workshopper, the succumber to jealousy, the cinephile, the husband, the teacher, the paranoiac, the father, the hypochondriac, the author of enduring works, the visiting professor, the chronicler, the grandfather who read Alice in Wonderland to his granddaughter…
The answer to this question is refreshingly short: all of them and none of them existed. He disguised himself as each of them such that he might always be true to himself. Or, more concretely, such that he might always be in harmony with that little boy who, in the mirrors of the tailor’s shop, seeing himself replicated to the point of monstrosity, had already gleaned that his personal identity would not be built on coherence. Years later, with many long hours of psychoanalysis under his belt, he would put this into words, saying he experienced “a mighty doubt, a disbelief in the unity of the human personality.”
***
Donoso was born into a bourgeois family in Santiago in October of 1924, just a few weeks after the military intervention known as the “Rattle of Sabers,” which forced Chile’s then-president, Arturo Alessandri, to go into exile. This would foreshadow what to expect of the political life of the country where he happened to be born, with moments of yet more complex upheaval, soundtracked not by sabers but by bombers.
Chile stifled and fascinated him at once. It is no coincidence that the first story he wrote and published in English while studying at Princeton—“The Poisoned Pastries” (1951)—is about children who are somewhat perplexed by their surroundings, as is the young protagonist of the first story he published in Chile in the renowned Antología del nuevo cuento chileno, marking the official start of his career as a writer: “China” (1954). But, without a doubt, it was the protagonist of his acclaimed novel El obsceno pájaro de la noche, Boy, who pushed this nonconformity to the point of aberration. Born deformed, his father locks him up in a country estate surrounded by a cour des miracles: a false normality. A suffocating space that institutionalizes the grotesque, reflected in the novel’s anomalous mirror, in which Boy’s monstrous traits serve as a metaphor for the society he represents.
In his memoirs, Donoso tells how his father’s side of the family was made up of old patriarchs of Talca. As he had no interest in living amid facts, he turned to invention or provocation—we know not which—to form a family tree with enough shade to shelter his imagination. He adds a twist right at the start, claiming they descended from a priest. He describes his mother’s family, in contrast, as “very wealthy early upstarts,” “a brilliant but makeshift tribe.” Ahead lies an irremediable collision between these two tectonic plates. Chile is a telluric country, and this is why its society shies away from movements, rejects changes, and gives a place of privilege to the status quo. This “geological fault”, as Donoso calls it, will be another of the bases of his writerly condition.
From the start I realized it was all a matter of inheriting a fissure, a gaffe that would destroy the superficial perfection of any vision, a fragility from which the drive to be something else was born, which was, in my case—as in so many cases from my mother’s family—the ambition to be reincarnated as a writer. I had no freedom of choice because a writer does not choose his voice, or his world, or what to protest, or his means of protesting it. (…) This pain came to me, since I was a child, as a consciousness of social fissure. (…) Perhaps that is why I’m writing now.4
This is writing born of and nourished by fragility, by a drive to become someone else. This bewilderment began to be forged at an early age. Perhaps it first came about in the three-patioed house on Ejército street, with those staggeringly rich great-aunts, already bedridden for years, where they lived for a time. Each patio was a miniature replica of Chile’s classist society, which the writer would go on to depict in his stories and novels, and which would make him empathize with those who had experienced any kind of discrimination, like what he experienced himself during the “sordid personal crises” that led him to distance himself or seek out “inviting hideaways” in which to “guiltlessly swap out the varied masks I found myself forced to keep putting on in order survive as something more than a facsimile of my surroundings.”
***
It is true that Donoso was a world-class hypochondriac who lived in fear of horrible imaginary ailments, like total paralysis provoked by a twinge in the sole of his foot or severe cancer caused by a backache, not to mention his dread of getting on an airplane, convinced it would inevitably crash. In his personal diaries he recalls that, as a child, he went so far as to feign appendicitis to the point of ending up in the operating room, having deceived his parents and the doctors alike. He evokes this as one of the epiphanic moments in which he discovered the power of fiction. It was at that instant he knew his life’s shelter would be provided by fabulation and lies.
As is common in the life of any hypochondriac, one day he ceased to be one. His apocalyptic prophecies caught up to him. Wounded by language, he started suffering bouts of ulcers (a word that, etymologically, means wound) every time he finished a book: “Why this sensation of a health catastrophe when I turn in a novel? Why this sensation of a drop in the oxygen of fantasy, of traipsing down the grooves of death, of deficiency, of being a poorly, vulnerable, defenseless man?”5
In 1988, during a long stay in the United States, he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. An anguished Donoso told his wife he wanted to go on living for three reasons: “One, for her and the girl, two, because I wanted to see Pinochet defeated, and three, because I wanted to know what will happen to TARATUTA (the book he was working on at the time, published in 1990).6
“Donoso never involved himself fully in public matters due to his withdrawn nature, his fearful character, and, above all, because he neither was drawn to nor trusted in what they superficially appeared to be.”
He wanted to die as he lived: writing. And that is just what happened when his diminished liver function, which condemned him to a very limited life in his final years, brought about his death a few months after his seventy-second birthday. The fact is, of all the ailments Donoso experienced, real or fictitious, he was, above all, sick with literature. His body was, in reality, his poetic corpus, his writing. In 1983, after a spat with María Pilar that left him despondent, he wrote in his diary:
I have to live inside this notebook. I am afraid of the outside world and its abuse, its ghosts of the past (Lafourcade, etc.), and therefore I must have, at least, a minimal share of life: my whole life must be what I write because otherwise I may die (heart, etc.).7
***
At an early age, he came to know the journey as a practice by which to recover one’s own vision, which he found fundamental when it came to writing, and as a path down which to slide toward an internal landscape. When someone asked him if living outside of his country had been a need for him, he answered: “I feel as foreign in Princeton as I do in Chile. This situation of estrangement from the world has nothing to do with where one lives, and maybe it is this sensation of estrangement that opens up the doors to the journey.”8
Something else he put into practice at an early age was the stationary journey: writing and, within it, an internal exile through the personal diaries he had started composing on another journey, when he went away to study at Princeton University in the United States in 1950. The eighty notebooks he filled over the course of forty-five years, which he described as his “living flesh,” were a sort of inward exile.
***
Whichever of Donoso’s masks we consider, we will come up against an incorrigible reader. He read his boom peers with dedication and urgency, going on to depict them from a place of admiration, envy, and interrogation in the inescapable book that is his Historia personal del boom. He reread Virginia Woolf and Henry James with cabbalistic frequency. In fact, Spanish-language literature owes a great deal to his literary Anglophilia. Catalan writer Félix de Azúa thought as much, at least: “He called us ‘illiterate’ for not having read the great essayists of the United States, and we thought they were all with the CIA.”9
He consumed books to take in their nutrients, to feed on them. So he said in 1984 in his diary: “I must try to remember that every time I read a book that interests me, for any reason—even to catch up on gossip, as in the case of this book—they make me want to carve them up and claim them for myself, and appropriate the parts that interest me.”10
Neither the paranoias that lurked about him nor the infirmities that came with his later years could reduce his fascination with reading. Nothing lessened his tremendous bookish appetite. For our novelist, more than a capital sin—as the Catholic Church puts it—envy was a primordial tool of creation. Many of his weaknesses, which were not scarce, rendered him endearing precisely in his fragility and the honest way he lived through his neuroses. “No pedantry about it. I must, must, must be honest and I must, must, must be novelistic at once.”11
***
He sometimes fantasized about the idea of getting in touch with “the failure one carries inside,” for he recognized a great source of creativity in him. But he succumbed to the delusions of fame and the jealousy he felt on seeing some of his boom peers, like García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, being revered as literary rockstars. He lived and wrote through this heartache. And thus his colleagues perceived him. According to Carlos Fuentes, he was “the most literary of all the boom’s men of letters.”12 Vargas Llosa broadens this qualification, claiming he was the most literary of all writers:
Not only because he had read a great deal and he knew all there is to know about the lives, deaths, and dirty laundry of the literary trade, but also because he had molded his life as fiction is molded, with the elegance, the gestures, the affronts, the eccentricities, the humor, and the impulsiveness that tend to show through especially in the characters of English novels, which he preferred above all others.13
Being a full-time writer does not necessarily mean writing for eight or ten hours per day. It is rather a question of facing everyday life with a writerly gaze, addressing all things as unanswered questions about oneself and about the world.
Why do I write? It has all been said before; that’s the sensation one gets. But, in truth, one never knows what one is going to say, what one has to say, until one says it in writing. Because I am not interested in those writers who reach a conclusion before their work does, and who put their fiction together so as to display it. I am interested, on the contrary, in those writers whose meaning, whose voice, is inseparable from the work they have done, and who, only through doing it, come to find it out and understand it. (…) If a work is anything but that, it is death, it is an abortion, it is not literature. (…) In the end, one writes so as to find out why one writes.14
***
Donoso never involved himself fully in public matters due to his withdrawn nature, his fearful character, and, above all, because he neither was drawn to nor trusted in what they superficially appeared to be. He was convinced that truths unfurl in dark depths and are expressed in the most complicated fashions, in language demanding of readers who are not necessarily either linear or rational. So many things can only be known through the imagination and the techniques of divination. In these dark corners, Donoso found his place.
A man is also his masks, from which his identity can be inferred, the oneness of a self, and they are as metaphors for this self, translucent objects, not transparent, that let light through and into what lies on the other side, but above all that retain light and are, in essence, opaque bodies whose presence stands between the viewer’s eye and the real object on the other side.15
His biography states he passed away on December 7, 1996 in Santiago. This is not exactly the case. People like him—denizens of that other side—do not die; they simply move into their books. From then on, José Donoso has done nothing but multiply himself into characters, situations, narrators, monologues. He has replicated himself in fictions that give shelter to thousands of readers. The most surprising part is that he has continued publishing posthumously. His articles, chronicles, and interviews, as well as his personal diaries, have been published in recent decades, on top of his novels and books made by others, such as the extraordinary and moving Correr el tupido velo by Pilar Donoso, his daughter.
It is likely that the best synthesis of who José Donoso was was drafted by Donoso himself when he chose the words that would go on his tombstone in the lovely cemetery of Zapallar, where he now rests: “José Donoso: escritor.” José Donoso: writer.
Period.
Notes:
1 Notebook 46, November 8, 1974.
2 Notebook 56, May 28, 1984.
3 Notebook 4, October 23, 1956.
4 Conjeturas, Santiago, Editorial Alfaguara, 1996, pp. 17-8.
5 Conjeturas, p. 13.
6 Notebook 59 A, November 23, 1988.
7 Notebook 55, December 13, 1983.
8 Contreras, Gonzalo, “J. Donoso: Quiero escribir una novela prescindible,” Reseña 3, April-May, 1989, 10-14.
9 X. Ayén, Aquellos años del boom, Barcelona, RBA, 2014, pp. 426-427.
10 Notebook 56, February 24, 1984.
11 Diarios tempranos. Santiago: Ediciones UDP, 2016. p. 128 (Notebook 11, August 27, 1958).
12 Carlos Fuentes: “José Donoso: maestro de un irracionalismo prodigioso.” El escribidor intruso. Compiled and edited by Cecilia García-Huidobro. Santiago: Ediciones UDP, 2004. 11-6. p. 13.
13 Vargas Llosa, M. “José Donoso o la vida hecha literatura,” El País, December 14, 1996.
14 Diarios tempranos, p. 161 (Notebook 22, August 10, 1962).
15 Notebook 59 A, July 30, 1989.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
