Source: The Independent - 13 Mar 07
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Best of enemies: The truth behind a 30-year literary fued


Literary feuds don't come more poisonous than the 30-year stand-off that's divided those giants of Latin American letters, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. And the real reason it all began is only now emerging. Paul Vallely reports
Published: 13 March 2007


History is scattered with great literary mysteries. What was the central theory of Aristotle's book of comedy, of which no copy survives? What were Ovid's unspecified crimes? Who was Shakespeare's Dark Lady? (Indeed, who was Shakespeare: Marlow, Bacon, de Vere or one of the rest?) Would Keats have got better had he lived - or, like Wordsworth, worse?
Why did Mark Twain wear a white suit in the winter? How good was the unpublished novel which Ernest Hemingway had stolen from a suitcase in the Gare de Lyon? Why did Mario Vargas Llosa punch Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his rival for the title of Latin America's foremost 20th-century novelist, in a Mexican cinema in 1976, thus beginning the longest feud in contemporary letters?
Ah, now there's a question. And it is one for which - unlike the posers in the rest of that literary litany - there may at last be a definitive answer.
These two titans of the modern novel - who were once the closest of friends, so close that Garcia Marquez was godfather to Vargas Llosa's son Gabriel - have not spoken since the day that the Peruvian writer landed a right hook on the left eye of the Colombian author three decades ago. Neither has ever disclosed the reasons for their feud, though both have let slip that it was "about something personal".
Over the years, there have been speculations aplenty about the cause of the original row. "It is widely suspected [that] it was triggered by differences in political views," one Latin American blog was still confidently postulating yesterday.
And indeed it is true that Garcia Marquez - whose most renowned works are No One Writes to the Colonel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera and the most commercially successful novel in Spanish since Don Quixote, the 10 million-selling One Hundred Years of Solitude - is an unreconstructed left-winger. His very erstwhile friend, Vargas Llosa, apostatised from his youthful love of Fidel Castro many years back and has since stood as a right-wing candidate in an unsuccessful attempt to become President of Peru. But, while their political views diverged widely, that was not thought to be the cause of the row.
Others have speculated that professional jealousy lay beneath the blow that sparked the feud. Vargas Llosa is the author of The Green House, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. But, though he is credited with being - along with Garcia Marquez - one of the pioneers of magic realism, his works are not in the same league as his rival's. One Hundred Years of Solitude is widely regarded as a defining classic of 20th-century literature, and Garcia Marquez is believed by many to be one of the greatest writers in the world.
Yet it was not authorial rivalry that began the 31-year-long icy feud. No; according to a new biography of Garcia Marquez, The Journey to the Seed by Dasso Saldivar, the two were fighting over a woman. And though Garcia Marquez is 80 this month, and Vargas Llosa is now 70, the animosity has not diminished.
Yet, last month, The Guardian reported that Vargas Llosa was to write a foreword for the commemorative edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is being issued by the Spanish Language Academy to mark the great man's 80th birthday, the 40th anniversary of the book's publication, and the 25th year since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Immediately, Garcia Marquez's formidable literary agent, Carmen Balcells, began issuing denials. The special edition will include an excerpt from a laudatory essay Vargas Llosa wrote about the novel before the two fell out.
Admittedly, this does reveal that time has brought a softening of sorts. Since the essay was published in 1971 (and quickly sold out), Vargas Llosa has refused to allow any republication of the work, despite great demand and at least one pirated edition. Last year he relented, allowing it to be included in a volume of his collected works published in 2006, but only, it seemed, with a view to his own legacy.
"There is no point in censoring a part of your life," he said. Given Vargas Llosa's trademark technique of shifting verb tenses to move his narrative back and forth in time, it is, at the very least, a concession of considerable ambivalence.
But there are ambiguous signals from the Garcia Marquez camp, too. His most recent novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, was published in 2004. Afterwards, he told his friends that he had "run out of steam". "In 2005," he told the Spanish daily La Vanguardia last year, "I did not write one line." (Vargas Llosa, by contrast, last year published Mischiefs of the Bad Girl and is said to be working on a pornographic novel.) But Garcia Marquez is now apparently writing again.
In 2002, prompted by cancer, which he has since overcome, he published Living To Tell the Tale, the first volume of what was billed as a three-part autobiography. It took the story of his life only to 1955, and it was widely reported that he did not want to begin the second volume because he would have to address the incident that provoked the feud.
"I have realised that if I write the second volume, I will have to tell things that I do not want to tell about certain personal relationships that are not at all good," he told La Vanguardia last year. Since then, however, he has been in contact with friends to check on dates and places to refresh his memory. (One friend told him: "Gabo, be faithful to your memories, not your biography.")
So what will volume two reveal? According to Garcia Marquez's biographer, Dasso Saldivar, this is the story it will tell.
Once there were two friends, literary lions who emerged from Latin America in the 1960s. They admired each other's work and from the first moment they met in Caracas in 1967 they became inseparable. Both spent time as impoverished writers in Paris before going on to enjoy literary success, in which time they both lived in Barcelona. In their seven years there one writer, Mario, spent two years studying the masterpiece of his friend Gabriel, called One Hundred Years of Solitude. He wrote a long laudatory essay on it.
Mario had an eye for the ladies. First, at the age of just 19, he married his uncle's sister-in-law, Julia, who was 13 years his senior. The marriage was not a success, save that it gave the young author the subject for his barely disguised autobiographical work Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The year after they divorced, Mario married his first cousin Patricia, with whom he has three children.
But Mario strayed. He fell in love with a beautiful Swedish air stewardess whom he met while travelling. He left his wife and moved to Stockholm.
Distraught, his wife Patricia went to see her husband's best friend, Gabriel. After discussing the matter with his wife, Mercedes, he advised Patricia to divorce Mario. And then he consoled her. No one else quite knows what form this consolation took.
According to sources close to the Colombian, he told her that she should leave her husband, if he returned," Saldivar writes.
Other sources close to the Peruvian say that on the same night, Marquez committed the worst (or best) kind of treason towards his friend Vargas Llosa. But eventually Mario returned to his wife, who told him of Gabriel's advice to her, and of his consolation.
So much for the story. Let us return to the facts. Some time later, the two writers met again. It was in a cinema in Mexico where the cream of Latin America's intelligentsia were present for the premier of René Cardona's film La Odisea de los Andes, a bad film based on a good story about a plane crash in which the Uruguayan passengers, sportsmen, were forced to eat their dead team-mates to survive. (Hollywood remade the film in later years.)
As the cinema house-lights rose, Garcia Marquez saw Vargas Llosa a few rows behind. He moved to embrace his old friend, as is the Latin American way. But as he neared, he received a tremendous blow to the left eye.
"How you dare to want to embrace to me - after what you did to Patricia in Barcelona," the white-faced Peruvian said.
The Colombian's face poured blood. A photographer snapped it, though the picture was not published until last week, 30 years on, in a Mexican newspaper, La Jornada. In a touch of magic realism, a friend actually did apply a steak from a nearby butcher's to the black eye (or "mulberry", as they have it in Spanish).
Garcia Marquez's world is one in which flowers rain from the sky and dictators sell the very ocean, a world of great beauty and great cruelty; where love brings both redemption and enslavement, where reality and dreams are hopelessly blurred, where steak is applied to mulberry. Meanwhile, Patricia was throwing a vase and several table-lamps at Vargas Llosa and shouting that her husband had made her look stupid in public.
What passed in the 30 years that followed did not help. In addition to trying to encourage peace in Colombia, his civil-war-ravaged native country, Garcia Marquez continued to support the Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro, with whom he developed a close association. The upside was that he used it to mediate talks in Cuba between Colombia's government and its Marxist guerrillas.
And he insisted that the friendship he developed with the dictator was based only on a shared interest in literature: "Only a few people know Fidel Castro is a voracious reader who loves and knows very seriously the good literature of all time and who, even in the most difficult situations, has an interesting book at hand to fill any void." Their friendship, Garcia Marquez said, transcended politics - allowing him quietly to whisper into Castro's ear, which saved the lives of many dissidents.
But Garcia Marquez, who penned the novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, has turned a blind eye to Cuba's continued application of the death penalty, which he has always opposed everywhere else.
For his part, Vargas Llosa was scathing about his former friend's links to Castro, calling him "the courtier". How, he asked, when large parts of the world's intellectual community had become critical of the Cuban revolution, over issues such as censorship and the treatment of anti-Castro artists, could Garcia Marquez always remain so loyal to the dictator? (Vargas Llosa was not alone; it was even hinted by Garcia Marquez's political detractors that his defence of Caribbean socialism had helped him to win the Nobel Prize when he was not much older than 50.)
And, while Garcia Marquez cosied up to Castro, Vargas Llosa was travelling in the opposite political direction. He became increasingly active politically in his native Peru and steadily took on more right-wing economic views. In 1990, he ran for the presidency on a centre-right ticket, proposing a drastic austerity programme that would have hit the country's poorest people hardest. He won 34 per cent of the vote but was defeated by an agricultural engineer named Alberto Fujimori.
More recently, in the 2006 presidential elections in Peru, he campaigned in favour of a strongly conservative candidate, and asked "how it is possible that at least a third of Peruvians want a return to dictatorship, authoritarianism, a subjugated press, judicial manipulation, impunity and the systematic abuse of human rights". Which is by no means how Garcia Marquez sees things.
And so the feud continues. It is a feud, as one commentator observed, "personal, prolonged, public, petty and so encrusted with ancient anger that only the participants (and possibly not even they) can remember how it started".
It has animosity, rancour and bad blood. It has politics, literature and physical violence. Now it also has sex.
Additional reporting by Graham Keeley
Mario Vargas Llosa
Nationality Peruvian
Age 70
Appearance Ageing but suave gaucho-movie matinée idol
Distinction National Critics' Prize (1967), Peruvian National Prize (1967), Critics' Annual Prize for Theatre (1981), Prince of Asturias Prize (1986), Miguel de Cervantes Prize (1994)
Reputation Olympian
Nickname None that we know of (far too grand)
Genre Latin American existentialist narrative
Form Novels, plays, literary essays
Key works Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War at the End of the World
Popularity at home (he's still involved in political lobbying)
Popularity abroad (hasn't published for a while)
Born 28 March 1936, Arequipa, Peru
CV Spends childhood in Bolivia. In 1946, moves to Lima, Peru. Goes to military academy at 14. Begins writing as a journalist.
1952: Completes first play, La Huida del Inca.
Marries at 19. At 23, leaves wife and Peru to study in Spain.
1962: Llosa's first novel, The Time of the Hero, is published to acclaim. It is heavily influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
1966: The Green House published. It is heavily influenced by William Faulkner.
1969: Conversation in the Cathedral
1971 Writes full-length study of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (later withdrawn).
1973: Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
1977: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
1981: The War at the End of the World
Politics During 1980s, Llosa becomes active in Peruvian politics. He runs for presidency in 1990, as nominated candidate of centre-right Fredemo coalition. He is defeated by Alberto Fujimori, who flees to his native Japan in 2000 after a corruption scandal.
Trivia Marries his first cousin in 1965; they have three children.
His first wife Julia (13 years his senior) wrote a reply to Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Excessively keen, thematically speaking, on prostitutes.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Nationality Colombian
Age 80
Appearance Elderly but still game Mexican greengrocer
Distinction Nobel Prize, 1982
Reputation Literary saint
Nickname Gabo
Genre Magic realism (inventor)
Form Novels, short stories
Key works One Hundred Years of Solitude; has sold more than 10 million copies
Popularity at home
Popularity abroad
Born 6 March 1927, Aracataca, Colombia
CV Starts on regional newspapers, then is foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, India and New York. Joins group of writers called Barranquilla Group.
First work: A series of articles called The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, in 1955.
1967: One Hundred Years of Solitude published; chronicles of the Buendia family, living in fictional South American town of Macondo.
1975: The Autumn of the Patriarch
1981: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
1985: Love in the Time of Cholera
1989: The General in His Labyrinth
1993: A Fish in the Water (memoir)
1994: Of Love and Other Demons
2003: Living to Tell the Tale (first volume of three-volume autobiography)
2005: Memories of My Melancholy Whores (volume two of his autobiography)
Politics In 1960s and 1970s is a supporter of, and sympathiser with, several South American revolutionary groups. Fan of Fidel Castro. Was accused of supporting Colombian guerrillas, but never proved. Now demanding independence for Puerto Rico.
Trivia So popular at home that urchins sell his books to motorists stuck in Bogota traffic jams. Excessively keen, thematically speaking, on prostitutes.

Source: The Time - 13 Mar 07.

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Two giants of literature, one black eye and 30 years of silence

Thomas Catán in Madrid


It is possibly the most famous literary feud of modern times: Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel prize-winning author, and Mario Vargas Llosa, his fellow giant of Latin American literature, have refused to talk to each other for three decades.
Once great friends, the two writers have steadfastly refused to talk about the reasons behind their spectacular bust-up, and so have their wives.
Now two pictures have appeared in which a youthful García Márquez shows off a black eye, and the photographer who took them has shed light on the origins of the feud. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it involves a woman.
Rodrigo Moya, a close friend of García Marquez, took the black-and-white pictures in 1976 but has kept them secret until this week. He decided to publish them to coincide with García Marquez’s 80th birthday and has broken his silence in a tongue-in-cheek account of the night in which GarcÍa Marquez and Vargas Llosa brawled, entitled “The Horrific Story of the Black Eye”.
The photographs, which first appeared in La Jornadain Mexico show a shiner under GarcÍa Márquez’s left eye and a cut on his nose. In one, the Colombian novelist is looking deadly serious. In the other, he grins broadly from under his moustache, as if acknowledging that the picture would one day become a classic.
According to Mr Moya, various Latin American artists and intellectuals had gathered in Mexico City for a film premiére in 1976. After the film, García Márquez went to embrace his close friend, Vargas Llosa. “Mario!” he managed to say, before receiving a “tremendous blow” to the face from the Peruvian author.
“How dare you come and greet me after what you did to Patricia in Barcelona!” Vargas Llosa reportedly shouted, referring to his wife.
Amid the screams of some women, García Marquez sat on the floor with a profusely bleeding nose, as the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska ran to get a steak for his eye. Two days later, Mr Moya took the photos of his friend’s black eye.
The long feud between the two literary heavyweights has also been one of the most colourful. The two men had been close friends – so much so that Mr García Márquez is godfather to Mr Vargas Llosa’s second son, Gabriel.
After the cinema fight, however, the two stopped speaking and embarked on radically different paths. García Marquez stuck to his Leftist leanings, developing a close friendship with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Vargas Llosa became an ardent admirer of Margaret Thatcher and ran for President of Peru on a Right-wing platform. He has been one of President Castro’s most outspoken critics.
Now the two appear to have buried the hatchet, with Vargas Llosa writing a prologue to a 40th anniversary edition of García Márquez’s classic work, A Hundred Years of Solitude. The text is reportedly an extract from Vargas Llosa’s laudatory book on García Márquez, written before their fall-out. The Peruvian writer is said to have blocked the book’s publication ever since.
Despite Mr Moya’s tantalising new details, only the two men and their wives know what really led to the fight. It is rumoured that while both families were living in Barcelona, Vargas Llosa left his wife and children for a stunning Swedish woman. According to the whispered tale, Patricia sought comfort with GarcÍa Márquez and his wife, who advised her to seek a divorce. When Vargas Llosa reconciled with Patricia, she allegedly told all, leading eventually to the sucker punch.
To some, however, Mr Moya’s account suggests that some greater betrayal was behind Vargas Llosa’s ire. If so, he isn’t talking. “We’ll leave that subject to future biographers,” he said recently.
García Márquez’s 80th birthday last week was marked by marathon readings of his works all over the Spanish-speaking world. Eighty cannon shots rang out in his Caribbean home town, while the Colombian Government vowed to rebuild his childhood house.
“Now that he turns 80 and 40 years have passed since the first edition of A Hundred Years of Solitude, I believe it is the right time to publish an account of the terrible encounter between two great writers, one from the Left and the other with a strong right hook,” said Mr Moya.
The fine art of feuding
— Truman Capote and Gore Vidal feuded in interviews, on TV and in their work. Capote, Vidal said, had “raised lying into an art – a minor art”. Capote’s response: “Of course, I’m always sad about Gore. Very sad that he has to breathe every day”
— Politics was at the heart of leftist playwright Lillian Hellman and novelist Mary McCarthy’s feud. “Every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”, McCarthy said in a television interview
— A close friendship between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, the critic who introduced the West to the Russian’s work, ended after a disagreement over the translation of Pushkin
— Salman Rushdie and John le Carré’s extensive published argument began over who had suffered more at the hands of religious zealots. The debate soon widened, with Rushdie also contending le Carré was “an illiterate pompous ass”
— Barbs traded by A. N. Wilson and Bevis Hillier allegedly include a love letter faked by Hillier and planted on Wilson. It contained an expletive-ridden denunciation, spelt out by the first word of each sentence. The reason? Competition over rival Betjeman biographies
Sources: Gore Vidal, by Fred Kaplan; Literary Feuds, by Anthony Arthur; newenglishreview.org; Times archives
Gabriel García Márquez
Born March 6, 1928
Place of Birth Aracataca, Colombia
Won the Romulo Gallegos Prize in 1972 for One Hundred Years of Solitude Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982
Also wrote Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
Mario Vargas Llosa
Born March 28, 1936
Place of Birth Arequipa, Peru
Rose to fame with The Time of the Hero
1990 ran unsuccessfully for Peruvian presidency
Won Planeta Prize in 1994 for Death in the Andes