Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (3 page)

5. A Biography of Sorts

Born in Buenos Aires in August 1891, the last of five children, into a family of cattle barons. Spoiled rotten as a child, distinguishes himself by joining protests and throwing things at his teachers. First, at El Nacional school, the largest egg in nature—an ostrich egg—hurled at a pedagogue named Calixto Oyuela. Then, at the Albert Le Grande school in France, an inkwell aimed at the skull of a geography teacher who refers to “cannibals who live in Buenos Aires, the capital of Brazil.” Removed from these schools, as well as from the Epsom School in London, where something bad—we don’t know what—happened, returns to Argentina. Persuades his rich parents that he will be a good boy and study for law if they will send him back to Europe once a year for his vacation. Begins annual pilgrimages to France, Italy, Spain and beyond—to Africa and the source of the Nile. Also visits the United States, Cuba and other countries of Latin America. Finishes law school, but never practices law. Meets Ultraist poetess Norah Lange at a luncheon in 1926, marries her twenty years later. Presides as a patron of Argentine arts and letters until 1964, when he is run over by a car. Survives, but with a debilitating head injury. When the house on Calle Lavalle in which he was born is paved over, a literary friend proposes placing a plaque in the asphalt to mark the historical birthplace. To which Girondo responds: “I was fatally wounded in the same place as I was born—in the middle of the street.” Dies in January 1967.

6. From Comoedia to El Puro No

As for his literary career, he founds at age 20 a short-lived journal with his friends,
Comoedia
. Four years later, in 1915, writes a play with one of them, René Zapata Quesada, entitled
La madrastra
[The Stepmother], which premiers in November. A second play,
La comedia de todos los días
, fails to reach the stage when an actor refuses to say lines addressing the public as “estupidos.” Seven years later produces
Veinte poemas para ser leídos en la tranvía
[Twenty Poems To Be Read on the Streetcar], a slim volume of street scenes observed in European cities and in Buenos Aires. First edition published in Paris; second edition three years later in Buenos Aires. Written abstractly and illustrated with nonchalant water colors by the author, it establishes Girondo as a modernist among the literary elite, both abroad and at home. (Samples are included in the current volume as “Prose poems.”) The same year, 1925, sees the publication of
Calcomanías
[Decals], a similar collection, likewise slim. Meanwhile, in 1923, helps found the journal
Martín Fierro
, edited by Evar Méndez, which runs through forty-five issues up to 1949. Promotes the publication on his travels in Latin America and turns his home into a salon for established and aspiring writers: Leopoldo Lugones, Macedonio Fernández, Jorge Luis Borges, Enrique Molina, Norah Lange and Xul Solar are among the Martinfierristas supporting the cause of avant-garde Argentine literature.

On his travels he meets Blaise Cendrars, Paul Morand, Valéry Larbaud, Ramon Gómez de la Serna, Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti, Salvador Dalí, John Dos Passos and other luminaries of the artistic world; forms a close friendship with some, such as la Serna; some visit his salon when in Buenos Aires, as do South Americans Miguel Angel Asturias, Amado Alonso, Olga Orozco. Settles down in Buenos Aires in 1931, but does not entirely forsake his travels; publishes
Espanatapájaros
the next year,
Interlunio
five years later. So far, all his books are short enough to dispense with page numbers.

Five years later, 1942, he issues
Persuación de los días
, a collection of poems numbering 142 pages. Considered by some critics his major work, in that, aside from its size, it seeks to go beyond the referential sign, to pierce the world of illusions and to reveal the emptiness and corruption of life; others might consider poems with such sentiments as “Invitación al vómito” a bit adolescent. (The reader can judge, as the poems translated in this volume all come from this collection.) In 1946, another collection of poems,
Campo nuestro
[Our Countryside], which exhibits greater wordplay, is numbered—46 pages. In 1949 establishes the Martín Fierro Award to help young writers; continues to sponsor and support new publications. Then in 1954, thirteen years before his death, his last book appears:
En la másmedula
(“Into the Moremarrow,” possibly “Deeper Into the Marrow”). Here, as in
Altazor
, the last book of the similarly wealthy, but considerably more productive Chilean poet, Vicente Huidobro, Girondo cracks the language apart, breaking it down into units and reassembling them; “naming nothingness,” as the writer Ofelia García noted, “to conquer and transcend it.”

Although
En la másmedula
is untranslatable, one of its poems has been anthologized, and I would like to try my hand at it:

        EL PURO NO

        El NO

        el no inóvulo

        el no nonato

        el noo

        el no poslodocosmos de impuros ceros noes que noan noan noan

        y nooan

        y plurimono noan al morbo amorfo noo

        no démono

        no deo

        sin son sin sexo ni órbita

        el yerto inóseo noo en unisolo amódulo

        sin poros y sin nódulo

        ni yo ni fosa ni hoyo

        el macro no ni polvo

        el no más nada todo

        el puro no

        sin no

        THE PURE NO

        NO

        the inovulate no

        the no-show no

        the no-o

        the no primocosmic soup of polluto-zero noes going no no no

        and no-o

        and no in multimono to the amorphous sicko no-o

        not Mephisto

        not in excelsis Deo

        soundless sexless not in orbit

        the obdurate non-osseous no-o in unisolo unmodulo

        non-porous and non-nodulose

        with no ego nor furrow nor final hollow

        the macro not from dust no

        the no more everything/nothing no

        the pure no

        minus no [1—see end of Anti-Preface]

7. Ennui

So then, a career that fills up a little entry in a bibliography or encyclopedia of Latin American writers and a body of heterogeneous works that gives critics interesting things to analyze and comment upon; but no one seems to have noticed the great gaps of years between each of those scant productions. Photographs show Girondo sitting beneath bookcases crammed with volumes and folders rising from floor to ceiling, his desk covered with manuscripts and books in the making. The greats of world culture are tramping through his house, Salvador Dalí is making crazy faces in the center of the room, Pablo Neruda drops by to share a few poems from his latest work in progress, young iconoclasts throw out bright quips to win the attention of their literary idols, Jorge Borges listens thoughtfully from a dark corner, servants creep around serving sweetmeats and drinks, Norah talks quietly with an indigent poetess who timidly hints at a loan, ideas are hatched, journals are launched, and in the midst of the ferment sits a little hunched man with a goatee and a bit of a glassy walleye whose puppet effigy in the antechamber reminds every incoming and outgoing guest that he possesses a hurricane of imagination that can blow them all away—and he produces nothing! What in the hell is going on? [2—see end of Anti-Preface]

Perhaps it was not the parlor games or the peregrinations that stayed his pen, but something deeper gnawing away at his soul. In his first book,
Twenty Poems To Be Read in a Streetcar
, he honored his publisher Evar Méndez’s request for a preface, which turned out to be his first and final address to the reader. Among other things he writes:

The voluptuousness of humiliating ourselves before our very own eyes? A tenderness for that which we despise? I don’t know. The fact is that instead of deciding its cremation, we condescend to inter the manuscript in a drawer of our writing desk, until one fine day, when we can least prevent it, people come asking about the keyhole.

Nationalistic reasons, he continues, do not persuade him to release his work to the public, for one’s country is as impersonal as a hotel room, and “it is hard to become attached to hotel rooms.” Then he declares:

Publish? Publish when even the best publish 1,071% more times than they ought? I do not have, nor do I wish to have, the blood of a statue. I do not lay claim to the humiliation of suffering the sparrows. I do not aspire to an ordinary tomb slobbered over by admirers, since the only really interesting thing is the mechanism of feeling and thinking. Proof of existence!

The reason he releases
Veinte poemas
, he concludes, is simply a weakness for contrariness, which he takes to be synonymous with life. He tosses out his work like a stone, “smiling at the futility of my gesture.”

Here, then, is the most likely explanation for Girondo’s scimpy output: profound literary ennui—at the age of 31! If it endured, then over the next forty-five years he would allow himself the joy and the vanity of completing a literary project and not stashing it permanently in a desk drawer only when the spirit of contradiction moved him. Most of the time, however, he would relinguish that occupation to others, and because he was rich and generous—indulge them in their pretensions and pleasures. For himself he would reserve the rarefied delight of fleeting and incommunicable thoughts, and accept the despair of their ephemerality, longing for the clean slate of the pure no.

Does that mean that there might be a trunk somewhere brimming over with remarkable manuscripts, unpredictable and mind-boggling as
Scarecrow
on each and every page? Evidently not. A friend and witness of his last years, Lila Mora y Araujo, reports that Girondo systematically destroyed everything left in his desk that he deemed unworthy of publication. The scraps that remained and that since have been published are disappointing and negligible. However, one of his relatives, Susana Lange, has discovered his early play,
La madrastra
, and plans to publish it.

Conclusion

So
Scarecrow
stands alone as a sentinel of what might have been... No, wait, that’s what a critic would say, ignoring the individual accomplishment and evaluating a literary work on the basis of the historical fluke that enabled it to influence or generate other literary works. Rather than take that line, let us say that
Scarecrow
stands alone on the hill as a once-in-a-lifetime fabrication, within the reach of our senses and yet enigmatic, lit from behind by the glow of a strange
Lunarlude
, inspiring wonder, amusement and a degree of consternation. From the silhouette you can make out that the creature, indeed, does wear a suit and a tie, and his top hat is turned forward in the proper direction, but even so he appears to mock, not to honor a fashion. A slip has been tucked into his chest pocket—a ticket to eternity, or a parking violation?

Consider yourself introduced. I’m done with the amenities. But still I can’t get over the fact that Girondo did not put together fifteen or twenty more ogres. Populated a whole countryside with bug-eyed constructions, each more outlandish than the next. I know that he had the talent to do so and am angry at him for not using it, whatever his ennui or distractions. After all, he didn’t have to get up and go to work every morning; he owned his own island—why didn’t he write there? Right now I am grabbing him by the throat, yanking him up out of his mouldy grave and shouting in his indifferent face: “You old lazybones! Why did you stop? You could have been the Gogol of the twentieth century! The world needs more scarecrows, more scarecrows!” But the next moment I am thinking: “Thank you for this horrible, tasteless and irreverent image. I couldn’t have conceived it—or written this anti-preface—without you. You’re like no other dead writer I know.”

Now despise all future prefaces and turn the page—or press the button. If you’re wearing a tie, have your hat on backwards or smell of civet spray, you may need this book more than you think.

        Karl August Kvitko

        Publisher, Xenos Books

NOTES

[1] For a special thrill listen to Girondo himself reciting “El puro no” in a voice resonant with Weltschmerz. Go on the Internet to http://www.cervantesvirtual.com and type his name in the “Busqueda” window.

[2] I am speaking, of course, of the literary or spiritual scarecrow, not his
papier-mâché
incarnation. Dubbed Colonel Molina, the dummy was inherited after Girondo’s demise by friend and fellow poet Enrique Molina. However, at two meters in height it was too big for Molina’s apartment, so he donated it to the city museum of Buenos Aires, where it may still be accessible to all as a thumbnail photograph on the Internet: http://www.buenosaires.gov.ar/cultura/museos/ciudad/index.html

SCARECROW

        Accessible to All

                                                I    know  nothing

                                                You  know  nothing

                                                Thou knowest nothing

                                                He  knows  nothing

                                                Men   know  nothing

                                                Women know nothing

                                                You all know nothing