All writing of the modern age was to be born at the top of that
tower, at the precise moment when Montaigne confessed, at
the start of the Essays, that he was writing with the aim of
getting to know himself.
Enrique Vila-Matas
Dietario voluble, p. 263
I’ve spent the past few days looking into the latest literary diaries published in Spanish. There are lots of them, each different from the others. To save time, I’ll turn straight to an expert, Enrique Vila-Matas, who works in a similar genre: the dietario. In Impón tu suerte, I come across an article on Lo que importa es la ilusión, el dietario (2007-2010) by Ignacio Vidal-Folch (another writer who puts a hyphen between his surnames) in which Vila-Matas mentions other titles: the Diarios of Iñaki Uriarte and Ratas en el jardín by Valentí Puig. Intrigued, I read all of said books. A good decision. Still, I find that none of them is really a literary diary, strictly speaking; rather, all are what Vila-Matas calls a dietario, which might be a “ledger” in English (the Spanish term is ugly; it sounds like a vegan cookbook, but it’s common parlance now, so what can you do?).
Colombian professor Andrea Torres Perdigón explains the term thusly: “The dietario implies a form of organizing tasks or ideas, and—though not necessarily—a log of personal notes or anecdotes recording what happens day by day.” Therefore, the dietario generally tends toward the essayistic, toward the highbrow quote, toward recalling one’s readings; which is to say, reading them in private so as to share them in public. The dietario is often—though not always—a reader’s diary written in the first person, in which the author has the cautious and calculated recklessness to speak of his personal life. The dietario is the book fanatic’s dream: to read them is to converse with the best a library has to offer. Nevertheless, there is nothing preventing the dietario’s writer, along the way, from examining himself, studying himself through his readings (cue Montaigne), and even revealing unspeakable offences and vices. At the end of the day, it’s all literature, and in this kind of book, literature encompasses absolutely everything.
The term was popularized in 2009 when the very same Vila-Matas published his Dietario voluble. “It’s here to stay,” some might say.
I mention all this because I recently got my hands on a book by Chile’s Álvaro Campos whose title is, quite simply, Diarios (Laurel, 2022), and the first thing that stood out to me about it, after reading five pages, was that it has little in common with a diary and a lot in common with a dietario. It’s a book by a writer who refuses to be a writer, at least in public. The name on the book reads “Álvaro D. Campos.” The “D.” is a reference to one of Fernando Pessoa’s many heteronyms—a reference that seems direct and playful at first, but, when examined from up close, gives a different impression. It strikes me more as a statement of principles, a poetics. In one of his best-known poems, Álvaro de Campos—a naval engineer educated in Scotland—says “I am nothing. / I shall always be nothing. / I can only want to be nothing. / Apart from this, I have in me all the dreams in the world.” There could be no better start to this “diary” than a denial of authorship, in the style of Juan Luis Martínez. Here it’s a case of identity theft, an elegant way of saying, “I’m almost someone else, like Álvaro de Campos, naval engineer, disciple of Alberto Caeiro.”
We’re off to a good start.
For a long time, Campos refused to publish his work, and he has not participated—it seems he never will—in the Chilean literary world. He works as a shopkeeper in the commune of Pudahuel in Santiago de Chile. He claims he does all his writing on his cell phone while he’s at work. This may be the case, but it’s clear that he reads more than he writes, and I doubt he reads while selling groceries. Álvaro Campos is an intellectual and, as we shall see, an amply solvent son of the lettered city, possessed of an education far beyond the average of his peers (if they have one at all). His being from Pudahuel has become a point of interest among friends and enemies alike. I’m not sure what’s so special about it; there seems to be some epistemological difference between reading Thucydides in Maipú or in Vitacura. My friends in Chile tell me it would be a contradiction in political terms to be conservative (or not to be a lefty) and to live in a middle- or lower-middle-class neighborhood. It makes you cry. Back to Campos.
I repeat, his Diarios are not a diary. This book is a dietario any way you slice it. Better still. I enjoyed making a list of the authors cited in a book just 180 pages long. I did so not out of any bad intent, but rather, quite the contrary, out of chauvinism: I want to make sure I’ve read the same books as the author. A glut of quotes—as Vila-Matas rightly observed—shows just one thing: an excessive passion for reading. And this book shows it in spades. A dietario is a ledger of readings and the most thorough log of recommendations. A log, that is, of the books that provoke instant happiness, as the Diarios (which are not a diary) of Álvaro D. Campos did for me.
Without further ado, let’s get down to literature. The book opens with two quotes: one taken from Montaigne’s “On Vanity” and the other from Pío Barroja’s El sabor de la venganza. Still on the same page, the diaries of Christopher Columbus. Later, the character Oblomov from the novel of the same name; Kafka; Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin alongside Tolstoy; from Uruguay, Mario Levrero (another diary-writer, but in his case, it was the diary of a sick man). In this book’s pages, Werner Herzog, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Ovid, and Tiresias share space. On the trashy side, Campos quotes Caravaggio, who was trashy and a criminal to boot. I read this entry aloud to a friend of mine, Italian researcher and Dante expert Roberto Pesce, and he agrees entirely with Campos. The analogy is indubitably clever, triggering more than just one smile. To speak of the days when “the world was open,” he uses Macrobius (fifth century A.D.). I come across a quote from André Gide, who survives—as most (or most of those who know) would agree—only through his diaries. He couldn’t leave out Dr. Johnson when speaking of “perfect courtesy”: being a gentleman, he tells us, means not talking only about one’s own profession. Which is to say, quite the contrary of what this book does. It seems to me that even Dr. Johnson was wrong from time to time.
And that’s not all I found. One of the literary encounters I like best in this book involves Allen Ginsberg and William Borroughs, when they go to visit the irascible Céline in Paris. Don’t forget, Ginsberg was Jewish. Want proof of high culture? Have an appearance from Archilochus, that “domestic trash” of Ancient Greece, who wrote one of the most famous of all poems—Campos calls it “immortal,” and I agree with him—on cunning and cowardice. There is no shortage of poets, and many are among the best. Théophile Gautier suggests the ideal weight for a lyric poet is forty-five kilograms. It is a joy to find Raúl Ruiz in this book, who gave a great deal of thought to Chilean mediocrity. On a scale of one to seven, Chile always gets a five. Campos leaves nothing out.
Montaigne is also quoted on his kidney stones, which are as famous as Seneca’s. This subject, obviously, does not appear in his essays. I’m not sure where Campos dug it up. Rousseau appears alongside Proust. The roster of sick writers is remarkable. In Chile, we have the poet Gonzalo Millán and his legendary (and recently republished) diary Veneno de escorpión azul. Strange, excentric, and spectacular writers abound: Juan Emar, Cormac McCarthy, Nietzsche (who was more than a writer and more than a philosopher). José Pla appears with a quote from El cuaderno azul—how could he not? Balzac can’t be missed: he once dressed up as a widow so as to give his creditors the slip. Other diarists present in these pages are Alfonso Calderón of Chile (already largely forgotten) and Casanova; only a covenant of love could force us through the latter’s two thick volumes.
Terry Eagleton’s appearance shows us Campos is at least a little interested in literary theory. Camus, Philip Roth, Flaubert, Louise Colet, Plato, Aristotle, Rimbaud, and Stendhal appear on just two pages, in order to speak on the writer’s moral condition. The quotes rain down and the pleasure intensifies. Russian writers? He’s got plenty, almost all of them, in fact: Chekhov, Gorky, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoy, among others, along with French peers like Voltaire, Zola, and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom Valentí Puig called a “mentor of terrorists.” From my point of view—I’m more modest with my definitions—Sartre is the “dunce of the family” when it comes to French literature. Others include Montesquieu, the Goncourt brothers, Descartes, La Rochefoucauld, D’Alembert, Julian Green, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Blanchot, and Pascal. Philip Roth is here, as is Joseph Roth, author of The White Cities. At this point, I wonder how much I have left to read.
To speak on love in Greece, Campos quotes a Theban soldier’s reproach of Homer; he accused our blind rhapsodist of knowing nothing of love. We know this via Plutarch, whose accounts are sometimes those of a historian and sometimes those of a professional gossip, in the finest tradition of Suetonius. While Campos is obsessed with the evils of the Soviet Union, he does not put aside the horrors of the Nazi genocide. In a long paragraph on Aushwitz he tells us of the questions that young people asked Primo Levi. Rome is here, not only through Plutarch but also through Pliny the Younger. Among local poems, he quotes Claudio Bertoni, author of one of the best diaries written by a Chilean poet: Rápido antes de llorar.
Epicurus appears with the lessons of the four-part cure: “Don’t fear death. Don’t fear the gods. Don’t fear unsatisfied pleasure. Don’t fear pain.” Campos suggests hanging a poster with this quote on it in every classroom. I doubt anyone at the Ministry of Education has heard talk of the garden of Epicurus of Samos. Campos also quotes scientists, such as Isaac Newton. It is said he “died a virgin and never touched a woman”—a curious way to remember the man who invented differential calculus. He quotes an excentric beloved by us all: Robert Walser, the man who used to think while he walked. He was one of those people who think on their feet. Campos is right to quote the Confessions of Saint Augustine—might he really be history’s first diarist? Leopardi is here too, with his monumental Zibaldone di pensieri, which consists of more than 4,500 pages, only fewer than four hundred of which have been translated to Spanish. Another legendary author: Elias Canetti, who nonetheless wrote one of the most boring diaries of the twentieth century. Making up for him, we have Flannery O’Connor, the very lifeblood of desperation, who writes: “Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted.” I read this quote and my heart melts.
This diary gives space not only to the king of Europe’s eighteenth-century provocateurs, Voltaire, but also to another somewhat “cursed” poet: Michel Houellebecq. Paul Auster appears, criticizing Bolaño: he calls him a “writer kid.” The New York novelist was not far from the mark when it comes to our Rómulo Gallegos winner. Bolaño’s strength is that of a youth, an iconoclast, someone who likes the edge even when he’s nowhere near it. It doesn’t matter; we forgive him for all of it. Another—not necessarily academic—quote comes from American researcher Robert Darnton, who has studied ancien régime censorship in detail and is horrified to realize how history repeats itself, from right to left and vice versa.
The diaries of Paul Léautaud recorded even the blood pressure of this excentric French writer, perhaps better known for his love of cats than for what he actually wrote. Reading Álvaro D. Campos, I wonder why we know so little about the diaries of Alfonso Calderón. Mystics and missionaries present in this book include Douglas Coupland and, from the fourteenth century, Saint Bernardino of Siena. I don’t know if I already mentioned Balzac, but he’s here too with The Magic Skin. Einstein is quoted only because he didn’t like Kafka. The feeling was mutual.
Where literary advice is concerned, we read Philip Roth giving the following tip to a young Ian McEwan: “Write as if your parents were dead.” Freud at his best. There’s not much about failure; just Fitzgerald’s “crack-up,” from a writer who truly sunk to the depths. Campos is interested in education. Wittgenstein appears, flatly rejecting the notion of reading philosophers. As did Callimachus. I read: “Callimachus summed up the true impact of philosophy on those who study it: “Cleombrotus of Ambracia said, ‘goodbye, Sun,’ and jumped off the top of a wall to get into Hades. Out of desperation? To escape an unbearable life? No. He had read a treatise by Plato on the soul, and he believed it. Fewer hours of philosophy in school would probably save many lives.”” This idea is not just controversial—it’s shocking. Should we be thinking differently?
Campos is obsessed with fame, being known, the writer’s career. In one entry, he accuses others of worrying about such things. One is David Foster Wallace, who, as we know, took his own life at the peak of his career. Lord Byron appears, demystifying Shelley, who—as is well documented—abandoned his bride, Harriet Westbrook, in the worst way possible; she would later kill herself, with Shelley himself to blame. We learn that some lovers are bad people and others are bad parents, like the self-confessed John Banville, who said, “I have not been a good father. I don’t think any writer is.” This is a rash, generalizing claim, and one which—whether consciously or not—Campos rebuts in the book, with examples from his own fatherhood of his son Alonso, who, despite appearing relatively little in this short book, seems to be a charming boy who will end up speaking without the characteristic final “-íes” of his father’s Chilean Spanish.
There are not many poems in Campos’s diary, but there are a few poets. Campos quotes a very amusing, even pedagogical book by Polish poet Wisława Szymborska: Nonrequired Reading. Chile could be home to a paper where aspiring writers send their work to get advice. There would be plenty of poets available to replace Szymborska, who would be in a fight to the death with every contributor to this imaginary paper after less than a second. Chile is a lost cause. Her literary world is a pitched battle, 24/7. I like one particular entry in which Campos talks about the dilettantes who can’t pronounce the foreign names of their literary heroes. He offers a novel reason for this: these lovers of culture “have no social life, they don’t go to talks or universities.” Which is to say, they read, but they don’t listen to what they’re reading.
The book comes complete with an X-ray of the lower class. Campos writes: “The lyric poetry of the barrio has a motto: ‘Your jealousy is my progress.’” I don’t know why, but this quote reminded me of Lucy Oporto and her essays on Chile’s “social outburst.” Jealousy, resentment, rage, and destruction. Is this really true? Tocqueville answers: “Resentment is the engine of history.” The quote from Thomas Carlyle—poetry is “a string of lies”—should be contrasted with the opinion of poetry held by the Chilean bards of the twenty-first century, also so close to Olympus and so far from God. It is no surprise to find Roberto Bolaño quoted (again) in this context; he scoffed at writers with pretensions of immortality, though he himself was often a secret player on Team Olympus. Evil is universal. Jonathan Swift claimed, “All my endeavours, from a boy, to distinguish myself, were only for want of a great title and fortune.” For a writer like Campos, who shies away from fame, this matter is not insignificant. Perhaps keeping your head down is one answer; perhaps doing nothing is another. That is probably the difference between the author of Los detectives salvajes and Paul Léautaud.
Another related subject—and it’s a big subject—is how writers make a living. Several entries address this problem, which is not only unresolved but also inexplicably ignored. This matter could be seen as the disjunction between manual and intellectual labor. Quoting Campos, “Why aren’t we butchers, gardeners, small businessmen? […] The intellect has been marked by evasion. All out of fear of the butcher’s.” As they say, “If the shoe fits, wear it.”
Earlier I mentioned Alonso, Álvaro de Campos’s son, who appears a number of times in these entries (much like Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s son in La tentación del fracaso), and who makes this look more like a diary than a dietario. Canetti writes, “We cannot hate someone we have watched sleep.” Here’s another shot from midfield: “It’s dangerous, but too tempting, to believe your child is your only homeland, as Bolaño said. But can you be a good parent and forget that homeland that is pain?” I have no answer to this question. That’s the trick. In this book, through the author’s thoughts and quotes from others, questions are asked; it becomes clear just how perplexed we are by life. The answers are less important.
The first to be perplexed is, of course, this book’s author.
Among so many quotes (and not forgetting that every reading is personal), I find one from Pascal Quignard: “From the moment the individual finds joy in separating himself from the society where he was born, and opposes its interests and passions, his thought becomes singular, personal, suspicious, authentic, persecuted, difficult, disconcerting, and without the slightest collective usefulness.” This quote is the ars poetica of any book like this one. An unsolvable paradox for an author who mistrusts the state-subsidized artist. Joseph Brodsky affirmed this idea when he claimed, “Before you philosophize, you’ve got to learn to fry fish.” And Valéry said, “Meditations on death (à la Pascal) come from men who don’t have to fight for their lives, or earn their keep, or raise children. Eternity is a matter for those who have time to spare.” It couldn’t be said in clearer or more convincing terms. I wonder if you need money in order to think. I don’t know, but I do know you need time, and lots of it.
Campos has considered the subjects of work, money, the writer’s situation, and the eternal problem of how to make a living. It is healthy to focus on this issue. “I imagine a society where the greatest thinkers fight—to the death—for the most meaningless jobs,” Campos writes. So what’s up, or more specifically, what’s up with this book’s author? At the end of the book, Campos starts speaking for himself through others. He says he identifies with a character from a story by Robert Musil who has never made money and is diagnosed with a medical problem: he is missing his “monetary gland.” “When I was a child, I always fantasized about having the same lack of ambition, but now I don’t find it admirable,” Campos himself writes. This is, perhaps, the book’s most personal confession of all, the engine of its inner tensions and pursuits. Among so many stars, a silent comet passes through these pages.
So what is Álvaro D. Campos up to? Is he really a writer through and through? Campos himself seems unsure. On page 176, he writes: “Not all writing is literature. For what I do, the nickname ‘notetaker’ would be enough. Many people have done what I do, have written what I write, all over the world and in many ages, under different names.” I like this ambivalence. In an age of certainty, someone doubts; someone wonders what he is. Towards the end, Campos confesses, “I am not a writer so much as someone undergoing a constant repair process. This library is my hardware store” (178). And then, “That’s why I’m scared to publish. Just one book—as handmade and humble as it may be—would drag me out of my comfortable silence, expose me, with all my pride and my failings, to strangers and acquaintances alike” (179). Too late now; the book’s out. What pulled Álvaro Campos out of his silence? I don’t know, but whatever it was, it’s a win for us, his readers: readers of other readings.
I don’t believe in definitions, but in this case, temptation gets the better of me. While it’s not clear if Campos is a writer, an intellectual, a notetaker, or a simple notetaker of his own readings, the fact is that he reads like a Chilean. Scratch that: like someone from the Southern Cone. I look back on the authors I quoted above: most are Greco-Roman classics, Europeans (many from the nineteenth century), U.S. writers—several of them, too—and a scarce few Chileans. What we don’t see in the same numbers, or with the same intensity, are Spanish-language writers, much less Latin Americans. You can’t help but think of Borges: an expert on Argentine literature, but with very little to do with the neighboring countries. It strikes me as a common trait of the Southern Cone, and one that is totally unperceived, of course, among local writers. It’s not a flaw; it’s a characteristic. Cosmopolitan insularity? Maybe. I’ll leave it up for discussion.
Thus far, I’ve spoken of the Álvaro Campos who appears in writing: the one who interests me most. I get the feeling his most enthusiastic promoters—and, sometimes, those who fire at him from their online trenches—don’t seem to have properly read his Diarios. The author as a character, and the commune of Pudahuel, seem to be the things that matter most. This makes sense; it’s a touch of literary frivolity. And it’s not unusual: it’s a surface-level reading. Or it’s reading him not curiously, but rather as if he were a curious character. I, on the other hand, am interested in his own readings, his passion for history, his thoughts on literary fame, his mistrust of progressive lettered groups, his admiration for Íñigo Uriarte, the author of the best diary to be written in recent decades. And I’ll stop myself there, because there are a thousand other things in this short book that arouse my curiosity.
I’ll conclude with this thought: I don’t know if I can call him an “author,” in the most conventional sense of the word. But a lettered intellectual in Chile? His readings confirm this status and then some; his activity on social media, also, is irrefutable proof. I suspect Álvaro de Campos would find this definition atrocious. In truth, I do too. But it might also be the case that this definition means nothing at all. Or, on the other hand, it might be a way of remembering that, sometimes, Athens exists in the middle of Pudahuel. Atenas de Chile.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
