[ed. I'm now down to one bookshelf, and most of what I read I discard. Reinaldo Arenas' 'Farewell to the Sea' is one book I will always keep.]
On a fall afternoon in 1983, I interviewed the exiled Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. I was writing my senior thesis on his work and, as part of my study, translating some of his fiction. (My translation of “La Vieja Rosa,” a novella, was later published by Grove.) Though I was nervous about meeting the great man, one of Cuba’s most admired writers, Arenas immediately put me at ease. “Encantado,” he said, smiling and taking my hand. Forty years old at the time, he had thick, curly black hair and enormous, sad eyes; his face was lined and leathery.We talked for a while in the library and then went for a drive to a nearby apple orchard. “Ah, a day in the country!” Arenas exclaimed, happy to see the trees and smell the fresh air. We concluded our conversation a couple of hours later on the platform of the train that would take Arenas to Princeton Junction and then back to his derelict apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. In a soft, melodic voice, Arenas answered my questions about his writing process, his influences, and the experience of exile with a natural eloquence and often startling profundity. Below is an edited and condensed version of our conversation, which is being published on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Arenas’s brilliant memoir, “Before Night Falls.”
Arenas was born in Cuba in 1943, in the eastern province of Oriente. An only child, he spent his time roaming the fields and forests around his family’s farm, captivated by the natural world. In 1959, he joined Castro’s rebels in the mountains, but he soon grew disillusioned. After toiling as an agricultural accountant at a chicken farm, he studied politics and economics in a government-sponsored program at the University of Havana and began working at the National Library, a job that allowed him time to write. (...)
How would you describe your writing process?
I never keep a fixed schedule. I like to write for a while, move around, read, drink something, come back. But when I’ve entered the world of the novel, that demands more concentration. It’s hard to even write a letter, because it means leaving that world. To put aside the typewriter and take out letter paper, or stop because you have to pay the phone bill, is terrible.
I won’t say that I write every day, because I don’t, but I’m always thinking. Often I don’t write anything and instead go to the gym or take a walk. But I’m always with my characters. They start to dominate me and occupy my life, so one way or another I’m working. For me the act of writing, of bringing a certain world to the typewriter, is only one moment of the writing. There are other levels, like investigating the lives of the characters and knowing what it’s like to be with them, seeing what they’re thinking and feeling and then quickly starting to write, so I don’t lose any of it.
There’s a very beautiful moment in the creation of something when you have no idea how far it will go. It’s an almost magical moment, when you’re constructing something from nothing, when this thing comes alive and you feel the characters start to live and you no longer have to live for them.
What would you say about your formal influences or the style that you use?
It depends on the situation. If there’s a moment—as in my novel “Farewell to the Sea”—where you want to satirize all the uniforms, swords, and so forth of a dictator, you can do a caricature of the baroque. If you’re describing the characters’ nightmares, that may be the time for surrealism. All of these techniques or styles can come into play as you realize your vision. For me, an entirely surrealist novel, for example, might end up being of little use because, since anything can happen, nothing has meaning. But there’s a moment for every style. That’s why I advocate an eclectic technique.
One of the most important things in the books I write is rhythm. In poems, short stories, novels. Silence is also very important. I wrote “Farewell to the Sea” in cantos—and silences. And I’ve never been interested in telling a story in a purely anecdotal or linear way. “Realist” literature is, to me, the least realistic, because it eliminates what gives the human his reality, his mystery, his power of creation, of doubt, of dreaming, of thinking, of nightmare. (...)
Is there something that you’d like the reader to understand or see after or while reading your work?
It’s interesting—no one’s ever asked me that. What I want is for people to both think and enjoy while reading. To experience an esthetic enjoyment, pleasure through beauty, rather than through a simple anecdote or social critique. I’m interested in readers perceiving a certain depth, not just something superficial that could be conveyed in a pamphlet. I want them to feel a delight attained through mystery and, of course, I don’t want them to feel they’ve wasted their time.
In general, you have to believe the reader is eternal. If a work of yours that people are reading now endures, it will be read in a hundred years or—optimistically—a thousand. You have to think that way because otherwise you don’t write or you only end up writing newspaper articles.
by Ann Tashi Slater, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty
