A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
RETIRADO en la paz de estos desiertos,
con pocos, pero doctos libros juntos,
vivo en conversación con los difuntos,
y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos.
Si no siempre entendidos, siempre abiertos,
o enmiendan, o fecundan mis asuntos;
y en músicos callados contrapuntos
al sueño de la vida hablan despiertos.
Las grandes almas que la muerte ausenta,
de injuras de los años vengadora,
libra, ¡oh gran don Joseph!, docta la imprenta.
En fuga irrevocable huye la hora;
pero aquélla el mejor cálculo cuenta,
que en la lección y estudios nos mejora.
—FRANCISCO DE QUEVADO
One breezy August afternoon in the village of Cashiers, North Carolina, I accompanied my mother to the local library. Despite a population of some 200 souls, the library is impressive and well-sponsored by the families who spend their summers in the mountains. They had received donations of estate books as part of the civic tradition of raising funds for community projects and we went to browse through what was available. A book edited by Whit Burnett—idea by John Pen—caught my eye, titled This Is My Best: Over 150 Self-Chosen and Complete Masterpieces, Together with Their Reasons for Their Selection. As I flipped through the pages, I began to realize what an extraordinary piece of literary history it was. Published by Dial Press in 1942, the editor had asked the influential writers of the time to “edit their entire lifetime output to select the one unit which in their own, uninfluenced opinion represents their best creative moment. A book composed over many years, the focusing of many lifetime viewpoints, a public revelation of the private opinions of our best authors on how they look upon themselves, and what, in their writings, they most value.”
The introduction explains that neither T. S. Eliot nor Gertrude Stein were able to contribute because they were in Europe (this was 1942). However, William Faulkner, Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, a trove of writers, thinkers, poets and philosophers contributed by selecting their own favorite writing. Some took the exercise to be a form of torture, but made the effort. John Dos Passos wrote that “The pages in past books you remember so vividly as having turned out well have a way of going sour on you when you look them up again.” Booth Tarkington considered that “There are few writers, and they are to be envied for their youth, who can be fond concerning works of their own construction already in cold print.”
Others were quite pleased to be asked. William Saroyan boasted outright “I have little use for any other kind of writing, unless it is my own, in which case I am devoted to the stuff.” Dorothy Parker, in pure Parkerian finesse, responded: “Now what is a writer to say about a sample of his own work? If he takes one course, he’s simpering. If he goes the opposite way, he’s Saroyan. It may be that I felt a certain maternal obligation to say a few words in its favor. Nobody else did.”
I found it fascinating that Lillian Hellman contributed a piece from her trip to Valencia, circa 1937. “This part is about Spain during the Civil War. I hope these people are alive, that they will live to see a better day.” And John Dewey, engaged in a study of Adolf Hitler’s writing and speeches predicted Hitler’s failure: “His views and his practice rest upon the lowest kind of estimate of the capacities of human nature. The moral source of his final defeat will be just this total lack of faith. For the foundation of a pacified and unified Europe is the discovery by European peoples of the true nature of the democratic ideal and of the democratic methods by which alone the ideal can be made effective.” Seems like forever ago, although in historical terms this happened just yesterday.
I found the anthology captivating not only because of the peculiar historical context of the pieces chosen, which gives a panorama of American literature and thought at a crucial moment in time, but also because through comparing the voices of the writers presenting their own work, one glimpses the vast differences in styles and ways in which each one approached writing. Oddly, the more I spoke with friends about the find, the more I realized that in fact it was still available in many libraries both personal and public. Carlos Fuentes, upon receiving the invitation to this project, responded by saying that he was pleased to be a part of the Spanish language version, since it brought back happy memories of his own father’s library.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay History that there is one mind common to all individual men and therefore the whole of history exists in one man, all of history lies folded into a single individual experience: “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” He also wrote that “The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. As we read, we must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience.” A little bit like taking a walk through Baudelaire’s forest of symbols that nod to all men in understanding.
As an American who has spent half a life in Spain working in publishing, I had long specialized in providing authors in translation for a Spanish language audience. So I found the idea of putting together a Spanish language version of this anthology a fascinating proposal for a literary adventure through some of the most celebrated writing in the language during the second half of the twentieth century. To root out the acorn, the kernel, the driving obsession of a writer, of knowing what he or she, in the quiet of their study, considers the best representation of that obsession. To listen to the individual voices and fasten the images to some reality in my secret experience, walk among the nodding symbols; to be a lonely child growing up in Peru, a young man in Madrid whose lover dies in bed before they can consummate the act, a painter in Tahiti who finds inspiration on a stormy night, or a mother who chooses power over love for her son’s future in a world of magical creatures. Perhaps, by living out these secret experiences, I might discover some occult map of the forest by its trees.
A Thousand Forests in One Acorn is much less ambitious in size and scope than Whit Burnett’s original. I suppose it is fitting for the new century and much could be and is being written on the current state of attention spans. Here there are 28 writers and they are all narrators of fiction. It’s worth noting that this in no way should be considered a canon, not even a personal one, but simply a selection of some of the important writers of the twentieth century who have been awarded prizes and widely acclaimed and celebrated in their countries. Space would never allow me to include all the writers whose work I admire and there are writers who would be considered more or less canonical who are not here, many of whom were invited but who were not able to participate—Gabriel García Márquez, Fernando del Paso, Fernando Vallejo, César Aira, José Emilio Pacheco, and William Opsina, among others. Sadly, others were invited whom we have lost before the process could begin, namely Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Daniel Sada. The late Carlos Fuentes was one of the last writers with whom I had the opportunity to work, his words having now passed into literary history.
By this I want to say that readers should not find scandal in the fact that one or another writer is not included since the selection openly assumes the multiple limitations of time and space, and the inevitable tendencies of a reader who is of the feminine sex, born in New York in 1963, who has had a more or less constant interest in Spanish language writing, and who has lived in Barcelona for the past 20 years. This is the work of an investigative reader, accompanied by the writers who have kindly allowed themselves to be carried away by the enthusiasm of a literary adventure. Here, the writers are the specialists in their own work, and my job as editor has been that of compiling the work chosen by the authors themselves.
Organized chronologically by age beginning with