Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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a tone that testifies to the intensity of the spiritual challenge he was facing. With his life in peril, he claimed to believe in Jesus Christ again and insisted that he had rediscovered his religion, “taking religion as the supreme consolation in life. Yes. Yes. There must be another world of refuge for the many on earth who suffer” (November 5, 1924).26 But neither two intestinal hemorrhages nor his recently rediscovered religion prevented him from discussing finances in that same letter. Vallejo explains that Mariano H. Cornejo, Peruvian minister to France in the 1920s, had begun a process to purchase him a ticket from Paris to Lima, but he wasn’t seriously considering a return to Peru, since Abril had all but secured his grant to study law in Madrid. Naturally, Vallejo didn’t want the ticket, but its cash value, on which he could survive until the grant came through—and this miraculously happened on March 16, 1925. It was three hundred pesetas per month and, although he never carried out formal studies, he diligently traveled to Spain in October 1925, July 1926, and June 1927 to collect his modest funds.
In 1925 Vallejo experienced a brief period of semistability when he started working in the Bureau des Grands Journaux Ibéroaméricains, a vast publicity organization directed by Alejandro Sux. Right around the time he took this job, he also began writing for the Lima magazine Mundial, headed by Andrés Avelino Aramburú.27 All of a sudden Vallejo was no longer going to be writing articles for his bohemian friends in Trujillo, but for a vaster, more diverse readership. “For this new audience,” Puccinelli explains, Vallejo continued “to mold the new writing of his chronicles and articles,” allowing himself to explore the journalistic form only to “imperceptibly enter the same literary space as his prose poems and Human Poems, to which the articles and chronicles count as parallel texts.” Thus, we see how the modality of journalism played a central role in the maturity of Vallejo’s later writings: “[His] youthful concern for finding le mot rare is replaced by the search for le mot juste,” and this transformation was organically “impacted by his readings of Joseph Conrad.”28
As it turns out, Joseph Conrad had passed away one year after César Vallejo arrived in Paris. An extraordinary homage to Conrad appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française (December 1, 1924), which, aside from a series of testimonies and critical studies, presented a selection of his works in French translation under the title “L’art et la morale de Conrad éclairés par quelques citations.” Over the course of his years in Paris, Vallejo gleaned this miniature anthology, translated his favorite phrases from French to Castilian, and scattered them throughout his own writings, allowing us to situate Conrad as one of Vallejo’s literary heroes.
In May 1926 César met a woman by the name of Henriette Maisse, and they became lovers in a relationship that lasted for about a year and a half. Soon after they moved in together at Hôtel Richelieu (20, rue Molière), the High Court of Trujillo issued a warrant for Vallejo’s arrest, making a return to Peru all the less likely. Later that year he took a brief trip to Spain to collect his grant money and, with coeditor Juan Larrea, he also launched the short-lived literary magazine Favorables-París-Poema. They put out the first of two volumes in July 1926. With a knack for agitation and a biting sense of humor, inside the cover of each copy they slipped a business card that read, “In the event of a discrepancy with our attitude, Juan Larrea and César Vallejo request your most resolved hostility.”
Aside from texts by the coeditors, Favorables-París-Poema contained contributions from Gerardo Diego and Tristan Tzara and even poems by Pierre Reverdy, translated by none other than Vallejo. Yet we must be careful not to imagine Vallejo completely integrated into European life with barely a foggy memory of his South American past. From Madrid in the middle of 1926, he made sure to stay in touch with Alejandro Peralta, a seminal figure of early twentieth-century Peruvian literature; Alcides Spelucín, Vallejo’s longtime friend from Trujillo who’d written El libro de la nave dorada; and even a young poet by the name of Emilio Armaza, who’d written a volume called Falo.29 Additionally, the letters he wrote to Abril circa 1926–28 reveal “a total change that starts operating in Vallejo’s conception of art, literature, and the function of the artist. This conceptualization would take a hard left, which is why in his writings one will find a tone that is more political than literary.”30
Back in Paris, in the winter of 1926, César Vallejo met Georgette Philippart, his future wife. The young girl’s mother, Mme Marie Travers, is said to have disapproved of the relationship. The following year, on March 10, Vallejo traveled again to Spain and again stayed for only a brief visit, which was also a parting of ways for him and Henriette, who moved out of Hôtel Richelieu. This was when César’s relationship with Georgette began to develop; however, on May 5, 1927, they got into an argument that sent him running back to Henriette with the hopes that she would forgive him, and she did. He left Hôtel Richelieu and went to live with her in Hôtel Mary. One month later he took yet another trip to Spain, where he was put up by Xavier Abril in his apartment on Calle de la Aduana in Madrid. There he met Juan Domingo Córdoba, who ended up traveling with him back to Paris just a few months later and whose accounts of their time together in Europe have proved to be essential material for the biographical study of our author.31
Vallejo’s health again declined in July 1928, and this time his doctor in Paris advised him to take a vacation in the country to recuperate. Accompanied by Henriette and Domingo Córdoba, he stayed at the house of Monsieur Nauty in Ris Orangis (Seine-et-Oise).32 He’d been in Paris for five years only to live a life of poverty and frustration. His success in literary publishing had been stunted by his open rejection of the prevailing trends. At a time when life was hard, his stubborn ideals made it harder. Yet, if the letters reveal sentiments of self-pity, nowhere in the writings of César Vallejo do we find a defeated attitude; a robust vivacity dominates his oeuvre—a gritty willingness to live and perhaps a perverse desire to suffer.
By the end of 1928, the ethical dilemma that had taken hold of Vallejo erupted into an all-out crisis. Change had become a necessity—radical change: revolution! In a letter to Abril written on October 19, Vallejo explained that he was leaving that day for Russia. Although his health had improved and he’d recovered his strength, his sense of purpose in life had become turbid with doubt, and it was this desire for clarity that drove him to the land of the Soviet:
I feel (perhaps more than ever) tormented by the problem of my future, and it’s precisely with the drive to resolve this problem that I’m setting off on this journey. I realize what my role in life is not. I haven’t found my path yet, but I want to find it, and perhaps in Russia I will, since on this other side of the world where I live, things move on springs similar to the rusty wing nuts of America. I’ll never do anything in Paris. Perhaps in Moscow I’ll find better shelter from the future.
* * *
On October 19, 1928, César Vallejo stepped off a Paris platform and onto a train headed for Moscow. This was the first of three trips that he took in the next few years. Despite his high hopes for finding a long-term solution to the worsening crisis tearing him apart, none of his trips to that young USSR lasted very long and, on this first occasion, he was back in Paris as early as November 13, 1928. Yet it’s astounding how many people he managed to interview and how many locations he visited in what turned out to be just under one month’s time. These raw materials transformed into a trove of new articles, a political report, and two books of thoughts.
The highlight of this trip took place in Leningrad, in late October, when Vallejo attended a meeting of Bolshevik writers, which became the central topic of chapter 8 of Russia in 1931. Two of the writers there (Sergei Kolbasiev and Vissarion Sayanov) were mentioned in the Peruvian’s oft-contended article “The Mayakovsky Case” from Art and Revolution:
At a gathering of Bolshevik writers in Leningrad, Kolbasiev said to me, “Contrary to what’s presumed abroad, Mayakovsky isn’t the greatest Soviet poet or anything of the sort. Mayakovsky is nothing more than a thespian hyperbolist. Before him are Pasternak, Biedny, Sayanov, and many others …”
I knew Mayakovsky’s work, and my opinion was in absolute agreement with Kolbasiev’s. And, a few days later, when I spoke in Moscow with the author of 150,000,000, our conversation confirmed Kolbasiev’s judgment for all of eternity.