Gonzalo Barr

The Times Literary Supplement recently quoted Ted Hughes on turning to (or turning on) your relatives for inspiration –

“Are your relatives a nuisance?” he asked. […] Perhaps you’re like a person I know, whose life is swamped by brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins. They seem to think they own you, as if you were their pet cat. […] All writers agree: you can’t write about something for which you have no feeling. Unless something excites you…the words won’t come. Unless you are an unusual person, you will never get to know anyone as well as you know your relatives.”

I don’t know if “all writers agree” with that, but enough publishers do or we wouldn’t be awash in memoirs — real, embellished, or invented.

For previous posts in the “Familia é uma merda” category, documenting how families and especially parents can abort or indirectly encourage a literary career, see here, here, here, here, here and here. Or click on the category title, “Familia é uma merda,” on the sidebar to the left.

Image:  “Portrait of me, made by Sylvia Plath, circa 1957, Ted Hughes,” wychwoodbooks.com; Source: J.C., “NB,” The Times Literary Supplement (Oct. 24, 2008), at 36 (quoting Ted Hughes, Meet My Folks! (1965), in which Hughes addressed children on the subject of writing poetry about members of the family) recently re-released by the British Library in a two-CD set titled, The Spoken Word: Ted Hughes: Poems and Short Stories (2008)

For our latest installment in the category of “Familia é uma merda,” documenting how families and especially parents can abort or indirectly encourage a literary career, we turn to Orhan Pamuk and Paul Theroux. Here is Theroux, from his latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008) –

[Pamuk’s mother] loomed large in his life and in his Istanbul narrative. I asked him what she thought of the book.
“She didn’t like my Istanbul book. Then I got a divorce.” He smiled. “She wasn’t happy about that. But I put her in the book — My Name is Red. Then she was happy.”
“I put my mother in a book and she was very unhappy,” I said. “She saw it as a betrayal. When my first book was published, almost forty years ago, she wrote me a long letter. I was in Africa at the time. She said the book was a piece of trash. That was her exact word. Trash! ‘Thanks, Mom!’”
Pamuk became interested. “You must have been sad about that.”
“Strangely, no. I was energized. I think I would have been disturbed if she’d praised the book — I would have suspected her of lying. I thought: I’m not writing to please her. By the way, I kept the letter. I still have it. It was a goad to me.”

For other entries on writers and their families, see here, here, here, and here.

Picture: Orhan Pamuk; Source: Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), at 49

For our latest installment in the category of “Familia é uma merda,” documenting how families and especially parents can abort or indirectly encourage a literary career, we turn to the Hemingways, Ed and Grace, upstanding members of the lace-curtain society of Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. They were, of course, the parents of writer Ernest Hemingway. And while there is no evidence that they vocally objected to his choice of career, they were relentless in trashing his books.

Before I reproduce some of their comments, though, I would like to expand on the last sentence in the previous paragraph. We have no evidence that the Hemingways objected to their son’s choice of becoming a writer, but there is no question in my mind that they must have been strongly opposed to it. His father was a physician. His mother, when she worked from the home, was a voice and music tutor. Both were middle-class Midwestern Protestants for whom social status was something one had to earn, to work at every day. I have no doubt that the elder Hemingway would have been pleased had his son chosen to stay in Oak Park, marry a local girl, earn a degree in medicine, and go into practice with him. And while Earnest did marry a Midwestern girl, Hadley, after the wedding the couple returned to a life of penury in Paris. This was post-World War I Paris. Artists converged there precisely because the city was so cheap to live in. Even that concession to his parents’ world view was soon to disappear. Not long after Hadley and Ernest had a son, he entered into an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer.

So what did his parents think of Hemingway’s books? They both lived long enough to watch him become famous and successful. Remember that his father was a physician in a small suburb of Chicago. His mother, though she had once entertained the ambition of becoming an opera singer, was just as provincial.  Both suffered from the middlebrow view that books were fundamentally a form of entertainment. “The brutal you have shown the world,” his father wrote Hemingway, “Look for the joyous, uplifting, and optimistic and spiritual in character.”

His mother’s judgment was more severe. When Hemingway began writing as a teenager, she told him, “Everything you write is morbid.” Later, in Paris, Hemingway learned that the five copies of in our time his publisher sent to his family had been returned.  His mother thought The Sun Also Rises was “one of the filthiest books of the year” and wrote to him, “surely you have other words in your vocabulary besides ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’ — every page fills me with sick loathing.”

Both his parents told Hemingway often that they would rather see him in his grave than writing about such sordid subjects.  What would their friends think?

In 1928, his father committed suicide by shooting himself.  Until his mother died in 1951, she continued to reject his work, trivializing it by declaring that the “essays he wrote as a schoolboy” were much better than any of his books.

(To read other entries in this category, about writers Lobo Antunes, Houellebecq, and Vargas Llosa, click on the category title, “Familia é uma merda,” to the left of the title of this post.)

Photo: Ernest Hemingway at fifty, John F. Kennedy Library; Source: Jeffrey Meyer, Hemingway: A Biography (1985)

For our latest installment in the category of “Familia é uma merda,” documenting how families and especially parents can abort or indirectly encourage a literary career, we turn again to Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes.Spanish journalist, María Luis Blanco, asked the writer about his relationship with his parents. Lobo Antunes answered [translation from the French mine]* –

Mon père m’a demandé quelles études je voulais faire, ce que je voulais faire dans la vie. Je lui ai répondu que je voulais être écrivain et qu’il fallait donc m’inscrire à la faculté de Lettres. Il m’a dit: “Très bien, d’accord.” Et le lendemain il m’a faire savoir que j’étais inscrit en médecine.

* * *

My father asked me what I wanted to study, what I wanted to be. I told him that I wanted to be a writer and that I should therefore register in the Literature faculty. He told me, “Very well. OK.” And the next day he let me know that I was registered in medical school.

Blanco also interviewed the writers’ parents –

[Le père] Il y a des gens quis disent qu’António est plus intelligent que João. Mais João est plus brilliant et plus ambitieux, alors qu’António n’a pas beaucoup d’ambition.

[La mère] João est très intelligent, et il s’intéresse à beaucoup de choses. Alors qu’António est très centré sur la littérature.

[Le père] Je n’arrive pas à lire les livres d’António, je n’en ai pas la patience. … La vie est trop courte pour lire António. Je ne suis plus assez patient.

[La mère] Je lis ses livres, mais je ne les apprécie pas parce que tout y est très triste … Ces personnages n’appartiennent pas à notre milieu.

* * *

[The father] There are people who say that António is more intelligent than [his brother] João. But João is more brilliant and more ambitious, since António doesn’t have much ambition.

[The mother] João is very intelligent. And he is interested in many things. While António is too centered on literature.

[The father] I have not gotten to read António’s books. It don’t have the patience. … Life is too short to read António. I am not that patient anymore.

[The mother] I read his books, but I don’t like them because everything is very sad. The characters are not or our [social] circle.

Lobo Antunes on his parents –

Mon père est un homme profondémont égoïste. Je ne me souviens pas d’avoir reçu la moindre marque d’affection de sa part. Pas plus que de la part de ma mère.

* * *

My father is a profoundly selfish man. I do not remember ever having received the smallest sign of affection on his part, no more than on my mother’s part.

*A note on the translations:  I assume but I do not know that the interviews with Lobo Antunes were conducted in his native Portuguese or in Blanco’s native Spanish. Her book, when it was first published in Spain seven years ago, came out in Spanish. Unfortunately for me, by the time I wanted to buy it, I could not find it in Spanish and had to buy the recently-published French translation. In essence, what we have here is an interview that most likely took place in Portuguese and was translated into Spanish for publication in one country, then re-translated from Spanish into French for publication in another. What I did was take the French translation of the Spanish translation of the Portuguese interview and translated that into English for publication in this blog.

Source: María Luis Blanco, Conversations avec António Lobo Antunes (2004)

No sooner do I launch the category, “Familia é uma merda,” documenting how families and especially parents can abort or indirectly encourage a literary career, that Le figaro in France and El país in Spain publish articles on Michel Houellebecq’s mother, Lucie Ceccaldi. In her memoirs, L’innocente, which are set to be released on May 7, the 83-year-old Ceccaldi attemps to even the score with her famous son. Recall that the way Houellebecq has told the story, and which Ceccaldi now confirms, she was a pre-1960s hippie-type who abandoned him at the age of five so she could hike through Africa. Michel Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas, but later adopted his grandmother’s surname. The character of the mother, also named Ceccaldi in Houellebecq’s second novel, Les Particules elementaires (1998)(translated into English as The Elementary Particles) similarly abandons the two characters, Michel and Bruno.

The real Ceccaldi is quoted as complaining that Houellebecq is a parasite who has caused nothing but pain to those who surround him. She will not speak to him again until he begs her forgiveness. In the meantime, she warns him not to enmesh her in any more scandal or she will take a bat and smash it across his mouth until she has broken all his teeth.

It is no secret to anyone who has read Houellebecq or read about him that he has attracted controversy for years. He disdains the soixante-huitards and believes that the Sixties produced a culture of egotism and self-centeredness. (The subject is being discussed again, given the fortieth anniversary of May 1968.)  He has been accused of being a misogynist. And he was sued in French court for making what the plaintiffs believed were anti-Islamic remarks. He prevailed and went into exile, first to Ireland and more recently to Spain.

I find Houellebecq’s work intruiging and previously posted about him here.

How much of this is an act and how much of it is real? I’ve always been suspicious of writers’ antics. Houellebecq once grabbed the breasts of a woman who was interviewing him. He regularly shows up drunk to interviews. Antics like those are despicable and generate controversy. They feed into the middlebrow notion of the writer as bad boy and tortured soul — as destructive as a rock star, except with his hair cut short and dressed in a tweed jacket, chinos, and loafers — whereas the opposite is true. To paraphrase the famous line from Flaubert (Houellebecq’s compatriot and predecessor), a writer should live the ordered life of a bourgeois so he can be wild in his work, in other words, on paper.  But it doesn’t take a public relations genius to figure out that controversy pumps up the sale of books.

The writer of the Figaro article observes that even if Ceccaldi’s memoirs have no literary merit, they do shed light on the cold and unloved infancy of one of France’s most famous writers. In short, but for Houellebecq’s fame and notoriety, the memoirs most likely would not have been published.

Ceccaldi says –

Je n’ai pas cette fibre-là de dire, mon fils, c’est le plus beau du monde. Non, mon fils, c’est un petit con.

* * *
I don’t have it in me to say, My son is the most lovely in the world. No, my son is a little shit.

Source: Dominique Guiou, “Michel Houellebecq attaqué par sa mère,” Le figaro (Apr. 30, 2008), “A mi hijo, que le den, pero que no me meta en chismes,” El país (Apr. 30, 2008), and houellebecq.info website

Through most of Mario Vargas Llosa’s childhood, he was told that his father was dead.  Then one day, he was taken to Lima and introduced to a man who turned out to be his father. The event later surfaced in his first novel, La ciudad y los perros (translated into English as The Time of the Hero and made into a film entitled, The City and The Dogs).  The starting point of all his books, Vargas Llosa said in an interview with Brazil’s Globo TV, are his memories.  They are the raw material of fiction.  (The interview was conducted by Edney Silvestre in Rio de Janeiro for Globo TV. Silvestre asked his questions in Portuguese and Vargas Llosa answered them in Spanish.  The translations to English are mine.  This post first appeared with the video embedded below.  The video has been removed.)

Vargas Llosa’s father shipped him off to a military academy in order to “cure” him of his goal to become a writer –

My father distrusted literature a lot.  He thought that literature was a recipe for bohemianism, economic failure, and that it was not very virile.

Instead, Vargas Llosa took his experience at the Leoncio Prado military academy and turned it into his first novel.  While living at the military academy, he read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, all of Alexander Dumas, and others.

For me [reading] was a kind of resistance against a system that I rejected viscerally. … I didn’t know it [then] but literature was a way of living that was completely in contradiction to that authoritarianism, [against] that control. Literature was liberty.

Literature is the last front of the liberties we have. That’s why in authoritarian, totalitarian countries, literature is so important as a form of resistance for those who write and those who read.

Vargas Llosa’a first novel was published in Spain after being rejected by other publishers and was very well received thanks, in part, to the Peruvian military, who held a great bonfire in the same academy where the novel takes place –

That inquisitorial act [the burning of the book by the Peruvian authorities] resulted in great publicity for the book.  I have always asked myself whether the success of the book was due to its merits or to that inquisitorial act.

On a more personal note (not far from the theme of rebellion, this time against family), Vargas Llosa also spoke about his first marriage, at 18, to the sister of the wife of his uncle. (I know there is a more concise way of describing the relationship, but I wanted to underline the fact that they were not related by blood, something he points out too.) Why marry so young? Silvestre asked.

Love. Love has no age. And besides it was a love that my family rejected. So then love became mixed with rebelliousness.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot — Vargas Llosa studied law in Peru before he left for Madrid to complete his doctoral studies in literature, publish his first book, and become a full-time writer.

Photo:  Mario Vargas Llosa at the Miami International Book Fair, 1985, Miami-Dade College Archives, Wikipedia; Source: Edney Silvestre entrevista o jornalista, escritor, crítico literário e dramaturgo peruano Mario Vargas Llosa.  Ele fala sobre verdade e mentira, política e América Latina, Globo TV (removed from the Internet)

Familes rarely nurture writers. They prefer to extinguish any inclination toward the arts and redirect their children to more practical vocations, like law or medicine. Refusing to succumb to family pressure is a writer’s first and perhaps most difficult challenge. Orhan Pamuk pursued a degree in architecture to please his mother before rejecting the life she would have preferred for him.

The Time Literary Supplement reviews his collection of essays, translated to English as Other Colors, which the reviewer notes has a strong element of autobiography –

In 1988, a little-known writer called Orhan Pamuk was struggling to complete The Black Book, his fourth and most ambitious novel to date. “As the writing progressed”, Pamuk remembers in Other Colours, his new collection of essays and stories, “and the book grew broader, the pleasure of writing it grew deeper.” This was small consolation, for “the novel refused to end”. Pamuk found himself alone with his obsession, unshaven and slovenly, “clutching a mangled plastic bag and wearing a cap, a raincoat that was missing a few buttons, and ancient gym shoes with rotting soles. I’d go into any old restaurant or lunch counter and wolf down my food, casting hostile looks about me”. He bore, he writes, an “air of ruination”. Put that Orhan Pamuk, the squinting nonentity his disapproving mother always predicted he would become, alongside the accomplished literary figure we recognize today, and you get an idea of his achievement. Born into a culture unsure of itself and lacking creative invention, suffocating in the “small literary world” of insecure, distrustful republican Turkey, the young Pamuk was bold enough to try his hand at a foreign art form that few Turks had adopted with much success. And the rest – the best-selling novels, a highly regarded memoir, Istanbul, and the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature – hardly needs elaboration.

Source: Christopher de Bellaigue, “Orhan Pamuk and the idea of the novelist,” The Times (Mar. 19, 2008)