Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
his family. Joined by the selfless Gálvez, Vallejo boarded the Oroya on June 17, 1923, and headed up the western coast of South America toward the Panama Canal, where the ship was to reach Atlantic waters and take its eastbound course.
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A little less than one month later, on July 13, 1923, to be exact, Vallejo arrived in Paris at 7 a.m. on the express train from La Rochelle. Filled with unreal expectations and a somewhat incomprehensible naivety regarding his personal finances, César tested the waters of Parisian intellectual life. Although most of his later poems didn’t reach the public until after his death, it was at this time that he started to write “extremely somber, straightforward, and deeply felt works [that] form a bridge between Trilce and the poetry Vallejo would write in the thirties when, having committed himself to Marxist ideology, he forced the teeth of the revolution into the gums of his personal life.”17 His first steps took him from rue d’Odessa, where he was lodged in the Odessa Hotel, near the Gare de Montparnasse, over to Montmartre. A few days later he attended the Paris premiere of Maeterlink’s play The Blue Bird, produced by Cora Laparcerie, and to his dismay the warm response it received, as he says in El Norte, was the result of “undeniable decadence in the sensibility, a consistent decadence, no longer the Byzantine hyperesthesia, but rather an alarming anesthesia” (February 1, 1924). Vallejo also went to and wrote in El Norte about la Rotonde, where he gawked at that “ambiguous hypogeum … a boisterous alveolus of cosmopolitan mange” (February 22, 1924), a polyglot crowd that filled the salons, where he saw Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita, Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, and Guatemalan critic Enrique Gómez Carillo, plus Tristan Tzara, Max Jacob, and Pierre Reverdy.
A couple of weeks after his arrival in Paris, Vallejo made use of the contact information that Casterot had given him back in Peru, and on July 28 (Peruvian Independence Day), he and Gálvez strode into the Peruvian Embassy looking for a man by the name of Alfonso de Silva. This, of course, was the first of many meetings between César and Alfonso, whose friendship during 1923 was essential to Vallejo’s adjustment to life in Paris as a young insolvent foreigner. In a letter to Carlos Raygada, Silva describes this initial encounter:
Having only previously known each other by sight and like-mindedness (which is, after all, the most important), we shook hands and began to chat. I offered to guide him around and help him out with whatever I could, and so we decided to get together the following day, not without having shared some champagne to toast to the “missing Country.” … The next day we met up as we had planned and took a stroll around Paris.18
In the short time they spent together, Silva taught Vallejo how to be poor in Paris, and Vallejo, whose spiritual genealogy can be traced back to Dostoevsky, became intimately acquainted with suffering. Eventually, César recognized how poverty had worn down his friend, and on September 15, 1923, he wrote to Raygada, begging him to purchase Alfonso a ticket so that he could return to Peru. “Europe is like this,” he explains. “Sometimes it can give and other times it crumbles your soul from which it repossesses something that it gave and something it did not. Alfonso no longer has anything to take away from here. He must return.”19
Watching Silva’s mental and physical health decline must have weighed heavily on Vallejo, whose conviction to support himself was tested by a brutal interwar economy and his own contumacious ideals. His letters to Pablo Abril de Vivero, which spanned the 1924–34 period, attest to the constant financial hardship that befell Vallejo in Europe. This, no doubt, explains part of what motivated Abril, around that time, to start pushing the paperwork to get César a grant to study law in Madrid.
When Vallejo reached Europe, he hit the ground not running but scrambling, working anyway as a correspondent with El Norte.20 His first years in Paris, precisely the period least known in his biography (after his early childhood education), are punctually registered in his chronicles published in that paper launched only five months earlier by his Trujillan brethren. To the surface rose figures of Peruvian literature and history that proved capital in that century: Antenor Orrego, Víctor Raúl and José Agustín Haya de la Torre, Alcides Spelucín, Juan Asturrizaga, Eloy B. Espinosa, Óscar Imaña, and Macedonio de la Torre. El Norte was well received for its opinion columns, unusual in journalism of that era, and it was distinguished by its courageous editors and their commentary on national and international affairs and their campaigns in defense of the interests of the country and the department of La Libertad.
At the time when Vallejo entered the world of journalism, it had become fashionable to follow a model of light, frivolous, impressionist reading, whose formal expression was epitomized by the articles of Enrique Gómez Carrillo and Ventura García Calderón.21 Contrary to this decadent aesthetic sauna, Vallejo’s chronicles are more closely relegated to those of Alejandro Sux, Manuel Ugarte, José Carlos Mariátegui, and J. J. Soiza Reilly. In the early chronicles his writing still bears traces of Trilce and Scales, where the text includes a metanarration of its own creation and the author looks for the perfect turn of phrase, the unimaginable expressions that would astonish his unsuspecting readers. This, of course, changed considerably as Vallejo became more comfortable with the genre and started to take stronger stances and embrace the directness of his extraliterary prose.
The article “Peruvian Literature: The Latest Generation,” published just a couple of months after his arrival to Paris, is early proof of his lucid generational awareness that he reveals throughout his European chronicles, without becoming smitten by a false devotion to a system that attempts to explain everything in function of age.22 The search for generational identity and the identification of worthy role models emerged in multiple articles and chronicles in which Vallejo distinguished two key concepts in his work: “indigenist will” and “indigenous sensibility.” It’s by distinguishing these two tendencies that, five years later, he reformulated the question of the “New” in terms of autochthony that, in the proclamatory article “Against Professional Secrets,” he so eloquently laid out: “Autochthony does not consist in saying that one is autochthonous but precisely in being so, even when not saying so.”23 Perhaps this authenticity is what he sensed in the then recently deceased Abraham Valdelomar, whose leadership he clearly recognized for his generation. Although it isn’t celebrated internationally to the same degree that it is in Peru, Valdelomar’s work paved the way for an entire generation to explore new literary modalities and to salvage from the past what was still useful.
In September 1924, around the time Vallejo was introduced to Vicente Huidobro and Juan Larrea, Costa Rican sculptor Max Jiménez generously allowed him to stay in his studio at 3, rue Vercingétorix, where César posed for Spanish sculptor José de Creeft, whose bust of the Peruvian has become iconic. Vallejo wrote about the sculpture and whether or not portraiture truly exists. “I’m afraid you may say it does,” he chides. “I’m afraid you may say it doesn’t, that the portrait is already an extinct artistic genre, an aesthetic species that, like the milodon in zoology or like the bone pfeilstrecker in Barbarian sculpture, now belongs to archaeology.” But he uses the debate to wage a critique against ambivalence, since he’s most suspicious of those who lack the resolve to tell him whether “the portrait does or doesn’t exist in art.”24
The following month, out of the blue, Vallejo suffered an intestinal hemorrhage and was hospitalized in la Charité hospital. Fifteen months in Paris and suddenly his life was flashing before his eyes. His stay in the hospital was long and drawn out, and during the fourth week, in a letter to Abril a fatalist Vallejo confessed his terrible suffering and confrontation with mortality:
There are hours more, perhaps much more sinister and terrible than the tomb itself. I didn’t know what they were until this hospital showed me, and now I’ll never forget them. In the process of recovery, I often cry for any reason at all. An infantile facility for tears keeps me saturated in an immense mercy for things. I often remember my house, my parents, and lost loves. One day I’ll be able to die, in the course of this hazardous life that has befallen me to live, and so I shall see myself, then just as now, an orphan of all family encouragement and even of love. But my luck has already landed. It’s written. I’m a fatalist. I think everything has been written.25
A couple of weeks