Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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thunder rumbles during the quipuchica of the enigmatic Kusikayar, and during a ritual sacrifice an eviscerated llama leaps off the altar and scampers away. These events signal the anger of the gods, forcing the Inca to resume the war.
Our discussion now turns to Vallejo’s journalistic production, the evaluation of which has thus far largely been reduced to a finalist concept of work carried out strictly as a means of survival. This sort of finalist reduction, for which Vallejo himself held so much contempt, is a convenient way to ignore an entire genre en bloc without attempting to engage its complexity or the intertextuality of the articles and chronicles in relation to the rest of the oeuvre. The articles and chronicles don’t represent slag but the transformational process of absorbing raw material and recasting it in a way that necessarily modifies the original. Again, we are reminded of the principle: not reflection, but refraction. The articles and chronicles reveal the “con-text, inter-text, and sometimes pre-text” of other writings and help us understand the author in a much broader literary and historical framework.75 Although in his lifetime Vallejo published in nearly forty magazines and newspapers worldwide, the majority of these texts appeared in four primary outlets: El Norte (1923–30), Mundial (1925–30), Variedades (1926–30), and El Comercio (1929–30). This journalistic work accounted for most of his earned income during the Paris years, which were grueling, as his letters to Abril and Larrea show, but the circumstance of their creation doesn’t preclude them from literary value. Quite the contrary, in his articles and chronicles—and in his books of thoughts—Vallejo employed a method of emulation that allowed him to level an integral critique of social norms, artistic trends, and political theories without falling into the trap of oppositional polemics. Before the eyes of unsuspecting readers, a chameleonic Vallejo entered the modality and composed highly poetic and critical texts about whatever topics he was assigned.76
In synthetic nonsecular fashion, Vallejo wonders if it’s possible or even advisable for a poet like Paul Valéry to accept an invitation to clarity from a distinguished historiographer. He refuses to do battle with Vicente Huidobro’s superintelligence because his vote is for sensibility. He’s hopeful of inventor Georges Claude’s idea to harness the power of the sea but pragmatically encourages us to be patient since nature takes no leaps. He distrusts André Breton’s aesthetic proclamations, rejects Diego Rivera’s call for propagandistic art, and denounces Jean Cocteau’s artistic catechism, his pure angelic poets, and all professional secrets. In his articles and chronicles Vallejo lends an ear to the wheezing tombs and fine mummies of Lord Carnavon and the Carnegie Institute. He sees the sporting match as the sign of capitalist competition and exposes the record-holding faster, smoker, philatelist, bride, groom, divorcee, singer, laugher, do-gooder, and killer in whom the malice of man mixes together with the good sweat of the beast. He soberly wonders what laws and instincts drove the Incas—in times of war and peace—to manifest a destiny whose historical significance is marked by highly developed social organization. He immortalizes Charlie Chaplin’s supreme creations and insists that the United States is blind to their revolutionary meaning. He sings accolades to Sergei Eisenstein and Vladimir Kirshon for their daring screen and stage aesthetics and yet vituperates Marxist ideologues who have forgotten that even their own messiah’s brilliance must one day be synthesized into higher forms of thought.
Through a host of critical readings of contemporary sculpture, painting, music, film, literature, architecture, history, politics, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and sports, in his articles and chronicles Vallejo seeks a way out of artistic secularism by revolutionizing the journalistic form as a poetic space where he emulates the writing of other modalities and absorbs contents that he transforms and recasts as a species all their own. This innovative strategy, as poetic as it is critical, becomes visible only when we read his journalism.
In addition to the massive compilation of articles and chronicles that has shed so much light on Vallejo’s biography, his political orientation, and his literary production in genres other than journalism, over the past fifty years enormous gains have been made in the recovery of his epistolary documents. The compilation of letters, telegrams, and postcards between Vallejo and his family, friends, and colleagues began in 1960 with the work of Manuel Castañón, who compiled a series of letters dated between May 26, 1924, and December 27, 1928, documents delivered to him by Pablo Abril de Vivero, who explained that they had been part of a larger cache that burned during a Francoist bombing. After this initial publication, several compilations appeared as more epistolary documents surfaced and critical interest grew, fostered by Juan Larrea, who collected, rigorously dated, and published letters in Aula Vallejo, starting in 1961. This continued for the next forty years until 2002, when Jesús Cabel edited the Correspondencia Completa for the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, amassing a total of 281 epistolary documents.
Although Vallejo wrote to about forty-five different people, his main correspondents, in order of the frequency with which he communicated to them, were Pablo Abril de Vivero (117), Juan Larrea (39), Gerardo Diego (14), Juan Domingo Córdoba (12), Victor Clemente Vallejo (8), Ricardo Vegas García (8), Carlos Godoy (8), and Luis Varela Orbegoso (8). As for Vallejo’s family, there are only seventeen letters registered to date, eight of which correspond to 1912–22, and the remaining nine, to 1923–29. It’s clear that there must have been more addressed to his relatives, since he makes reference to documents that we don’t have: “Tell Mom, Dad, and Agüedita that I’ll write to them on Wednesday” (May 2, 1915); “I wrote to Dad during one of my worst bouts of fear” (December 2, 1918); and “I’ll write to Dad tomorrow” (July 14, 1923).
In the letters between Vallejo and Abril, which begin on January 31, 1924, and end on or around February 4, 1934, we learn about the extremity of Vallejo’s financial hardship and the resulting frustration and anguish.77 It’s through this correspondence that he organized his entrance into mass-publication journalism as a means of cobbling together a living and diversifying the modality of his writing. In his letters from France, there’s an undercurrent of resentment in his feelings toward Peru; however, there’s also a tone of solidarity, especially when he speaks with marginal writers who hadn’t fallen into the grips of Lima’s aesthetic aristocracy or the importers of literary fads.
The letters from the Trujillo Central Jail are especially disturbing. There, Vallejo wrote an appeal to Gastón Roger, a journalist who immediately published it in La Prensa on December 29, 1920, along with another appeal, signed by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. Vallejo kept correspondence with Juan Larrea from January 19, 1925, to February 14, 1938. These letters reveal an endearing friendship, reiterate Vallejo’s need for economic support, and give insight into his vision of Spain, highlighting his torturous ethical struggle leading up to and during the Spanish civil war.
One hundred years after Vallejo’s birth, his final letter was published in the magazine Oiga.78 It was addressed to Luis José de Orbegoso precisely one month before Vallejo passed away. It’s a heart-wrenching plea for funds to cover the cost of a lengthy medical treatment. It turns out that Orbegoso, the excellent friend that he was, did in fact reply on March 25, 1938, wishing Vallejo a quick and complete recovery and including a check for the one thousand francs he’d requested. But neither the letter nor the check arrived in time and, what’s worse, Georgette was unable to receive the funds, since they’d been returned to Lima by the time she tried to collect them.
We now turn to Tungsten, first published in March 1930 by Cenit in Madrid. It counts as Vallejo’s only full-length novel and one of the five monographs published in his lifetime. Demonstrative of his political commitment, as evinced in his articles and chronicles from this period, Tungsten reveals Vallejo submitting his literary writing to the service of ideological propaganda in support of the Communist Party. Since literature was one of the most efficient means of ideological dissemination in the heat of 1930, it is understandable that Vallejo’s Tungsten riffed on Feodor Gladkov’s hit novel, Cement, which had been translated to Castilian by José Viana and published by Cenit in two editions in 1928 and 1929.
In view of Vallejo’s financial hardship, it seems plausible to suppose that, in addition to his ideological motivations, he’s likely to have wanted to capitalize on the aura of Gladkov’s immensely popular novel by situating Tungsten