Dear Arreola,

Several weeks ago Emma sent me your two books, and when I opened them I found a dedication that filled me with joy. But all that was nothing compared to the joy of reading the stories, full speed ahead the first time through and then slowly, taking my time and most of all giving them their own time, as much as they need to mature in the sensibility of their reader. I have observed that one of the most frightful problems with short stories is that people tend to read them at the same speed at which they devour the chapters of a novel. Naturally, the special concentration due any well-wrought story escapes them; it’s not the same thing to stretch out comfortably in a seat to watch Gone with the Wind as it is to huddle anxiously on tenterhooks for the terrible eighteen minutes of Un chien andalou. The result is that short stories are forgotten (as if “Bliss” could be forgotten, as if “The Prodigious Milligram” could be forgotten!). Should we not found a school for the education of short story readers? We’ll begin by getting all the received ideas out of their heads, remaking their attention, perception, and even their reflexes. It’s about time universities created departments of short fiction, as they tend to do with poetics. What splendid things we could teach there! Furthermore, the first collaborators in the department (be they students or professors) should all be short story writers. It’s strange that so many of them have never reflected on the genre. I’m not talking about stylistic reflection, as this is not essential, but that fundamental contemplation, in which the intelligence and the plexus collaborate in equal measure, and which should show short story writers the risks of the territory, its complicated topography, and the responsibility they’re taking on.

The short story is discredited by short stories. Have you noticed what habitually gets published in magazines? For every good story, for every story that lands on its feet like a cat from a fourth-floor balcony, umpteen others are either cuttings from a much more extensive situation (scissors are the writer’s laziness, or his inability to carry on) or diffuse treatments of any theme, good or bad; what actually destroys these stories is always a lack of concentration, of an “attack.” And I think the best thing about Confabulario and Varia invención is born of your having what Rimbaud called le lieu et la formule, your way of grabbing the bull by the horns and not, ay, by the tail like so many others who tire the presses of this world. And that’s why I’ve just read your stories—and reread the ones I liked best, and then turned to superreading them, which consists of reading them in my memory—and I am happy. Not for a hedonistic reason, or because I’m glad to know you’re a great short story writer, but because again I feel sure that you, that I, and that others—the list of which I’ll spare us because you know it full well—are not wrong in our chosen focus on the form. The French, for example, are mistaken from beginning to end in their treatment of the short story. How to say it? They play football instead of bullfighting; they submit the narrative material to a series of evolutions and complex combinations over the long term; that is, they apply the privative mode of the novel, which gives wonderful results there (let Balzac, Stendhal, and Proust tell you). Because they don’t see—and this is key—that the story is a matter of language taking shape together with the tale, they write their stories with exactly the same discursive language they use for their novels. But taking a step lower down, it is not hard to see that this happens because the driving impulse of the story is a novelistic one, and there is the great macana, as we say in Argentina, the unforgivable stupidity, of believing that a short story, which is a pure diamond, can be confused with the lengthy operation of finding diamonds, which is what the novel is. I don’t like formulas, but I think I’m right here: A short story is always the golden fleece, and the novel is the story of the search for the fleece. Novels are wonderful, but their technique spoils short stories. I said all this to Emma in another letter, but I like repeating it to you as I type because I now have the most solid proof possible in your stories. In your books there are experimental stories (and you warn me about this in Various Inventions, where you speak of “stammering”), where we see how you go about looking for the right tone, and sometimes you don’t find it and the story is left with one foot in the air (“The Fraud,” for example, and I don’t know if you’ll agree). But almost all the short stories in both books hit the bull’s eye. I can feel it from the first line. I can’t say how; it’s a matter of tension, of communication. I think the target must feel something like that, whether the arrow hits it along the edge (two points) or in the very centre (fifty points, and sometimes you win a chicken). It’s sudden and fatal. And I start to read “On Ballistics”—don’t think I’m citing this one because of the association with arrows and a target—or “Aristotle’s Lay,” and it’s over: The current instantly runs through me, the circuit is established, and even if the world collapses around me, I’ll be unable to tear my eyes away from the page. I believe that behind all this is the simple (and therefore inexplicable) fact that you are a poet, that you can only see things through the
eyes of a poet. I am not insinuating that only a poet can write beautiful stories. Strictly speaking, the short story is a kind of parapoetry, a mysteriously marginal activity in relation to poetry, and nevertheless united to it by ties the novel lacks (where poetry is only valued as decoration, and that is always a shame for both).

How do stories come to you? I also make poetry—or at least I write poems—and have not been able to see any difference in my mood when I do these two things. While I’m writing a story, I am subject to a set of tensions indistinguishable from those that overtake me when I write poems. The distinction is most of all technical, because I find the idea of “poetic stories” more horrifying than yellow fever, and I am always very careful that what happens in my stories suggests to the reader a definite structure, a given reality, as unreal as it might seem to the eyes of a newspaper reader and those beings with-their-feet-on-the-ground. (What are feet? What is the ground?) If I find in your stories a fraternity that excites me and makes me want to be your friend, it is precisely the supreme nerve with which you plant your word trees. You plant them without the circumlocution of literarily preparing the ground and “creating an atmosphere,” as if the atmosphere should not be the story itself, the irresistible emanation of that thing that is the story. Henry James is a great short story writer, but his stories are always the children of his novels, submitted to the same previous circumstantial elaboration, that technique of surrounding the reader before unleashing the crux of the story. When you wrote “The Rhinoceros,” you needed only the first (perfect!) sentence to make a person forget he was sitting in an armchair in a second-floor apartment on the Rue Mazarine (a lovely street, believe me) and that in ten minutes someone was going to tell him dinner was ready. The estrangement, the passing into the story, is detonating. You are a lion ant, if lion ants are the ones who make a funnel in the sand so their victims slip down to the bottom. Four words and zap, inside. But it’s worth it to be eaten by you.

Since this letter is no review, I’ll not talk in detail of everything that
might arise from my reading. But there is something that, so infrequent in our Américas, I’m interested in pointing out. I like your brevity. Perhaps with the exception of “The Crow Catcher”—so delicious for an Argentine who marvels at the twists and turns, at the expressiveness of the language Mexican people speak—I think your best stories are in fact the shortest. I am shocked at what you are able to achieve with so little verbal material. “Sinesius of Rhodes,” for example—which like other stories of yours makes me think of Borges, and I believe that’s no small thing—and the moving and very beautiful “Epitaph,” which brought François Villon to me in the flesh, the whole of him, with all his pained humanity still dancing here, near my house, in the alleys of the Place Maubert, former refuge of opulent and sentimental rogues and hookers.

I could go on telling you so many things, but I don’t want to bore you. Will we meet in person at some point? If you’re not coming this way, write to me some day when you feel like it. I’ll send you whatever I publish, which won’t be much because in Argentina the editorial possibilities grow worse every day. In any case, I’ll send you typescripts. And you too, send me your things. My wife, who has read your stories with the same enthusi- asm I have, joins me in sending you this big hug you’ll extend to Emma, so good and intelligent, and to the very charming Anita, and the Alatorres.

Your friend,

Julio Cortázar

Paris, 26 October 1958

Kathleen Walker

Editor, Américas

Washington, D.C.

Esteemed Señora,

I have just received your letter from the twenty-first of this month.

I am very sorry to tell you that what you describe as a “little judicious cutting,” and especially the “condensations” so skillfully carried out by the joint efforts of the two editors of the Spanish and English editions of Américas, seem like mutilations to me and are unacceptable from every point of view.

I’m well aware that my story is too long for the magazine. But when I try on a suit that doesn’t fit at the tailor’s, it does not occur to him to ask me to cut off my legs or reduce the number of my ribs to five. Likewise, someone who sells frames would not try to persuade a painter to eliminate several centimetres of canvas so it fits exactly in the available model. In this case the frame is Américas, and if my story is as worthy of being published as the last sentence of your letter seems to indicate, the frame should serve the canvas, and not vice versa. The opposite would, perhaps, be excellent journalism, but it is already well known that out of good journalism comes bad literature.

Don’t think me vain or pedantic. I simply wish to state that for me there is no intrinsic difference between a short story and a poem, in the sense that the rhythmic values, sentence structure, and development of the action should exert an effect over the reader analogous to that of poetry. If I accepted, for example, your proposed “condensation” of the final lines on page 2, we would also have to accept that the beginning of Burnt Norton should be “condensed” in the following way:

Time present and (time) past

Are (both) perhaps present in (time) future,

And (time) future contained in (time) past.

I very much doubt T. S. Eliot would have accepted that condensation, even if it is good prepublication work.

I’m well aware that in the United States alterations of this kind are common practice. Stephen Spender denounced them years ago in a magnificent essay published in Horizon. In Argentina and in France we believe Spender was right and that nobody, not even for reasons of style, has the right to alter a literary text, for the writer should bear responsibility for its defects as well as for its merits, and the only judge of them must be the reader. Personally, it would have seemed very reasonable if you’d suggested cuts and condensations to my story for literary reasons. What infuriates me, and obliges me to answer your letter negatively, is that the modifications stem merely from a lack of space. Would it not have been much simpler not to publish the story or to publish it in a smaller font so it would fit in the available space?

Excuse the vehemence of this letter, but I am defending something I believe essential to the very definition of what a writer should be. Nothing could please me more than the publication of a story of mine in Américas, the very wide readership of which I am aware and respect. So I regret that the stipulations proposed are unacceptable to me.

I do not want to end this letter, Señora Walker, without thanking you in particular for your kindness toward me and the efforts you’ve gone to on my behalf. Believe me to be your invariable friend, and accept my very best wishes,

Julio

P.S. Please find enclosed the form included in your letter.

Translator’s note: Kathleen Walker replied, “Touché! We plan to publish the unabridged story in our next issue (even if we have to print it in the margins).” “Casa tomada” (“House Taken Over”) was published in Américas, no. 11, Washington, January 1959.

Julio Cortázar’s first letter to Paul Blackburn, in 1958, began: “As you wrote to me in a magnificent Spanish, I am going to answer in a no less remarkable English. I suppose that half a dozen of good dictionaries and a great deal of patience will help you to decipher this letter.” He continued to write to Paul in English off and on over the years of their friendship, especially (as here) when including Sara Blackburn, his editor at Pantheon.

Paris, December 14, 1963

Dear Sara and Pablo,

Just a few words to say the Prizewinners did not arrive yet. As you, Sara, told me on November 26, that “under separate cover today by air, I’m sending . . . etc.” I am sort of afraid. No Boeing 707 has crashed in the last three weeks, so I wonder if, after all, you delayed the sending off for some reason. (“Sending off” sounds absolutely wrong, but I don’t find the right expression.)

Mister Blackburn, sir! I sent you a very nice copy of Rayuela by registered parcel. Of course, as said copy weighs five pounds, I am not rich enough to deliver it by air mail, so you’ll be kind enough to wait a few days, and the maritime mail shall present you with that immortal production. Which, by the way, has been taken by Gallimard. And which, as I told Sara not long ago, is making quite a terrific row in Latin American countries. As that was precisely my intention, you bet I feel elated.

Sara: I promised the glossy photograph and copies of reviews. I’m trying to bribe one of my pals at UNESCO, who works in the photostatic department, to make free copies of all the reviews so you’ll have a rich (well, a moderately rich) harvest of opinions about your humble servant.

Kennedy’s death left us so bewildered, so confused and indignant that only speaking to you personally I perhaps could give you an idea of our feelings. When I said “our” I mean France, I mean Europe. The weeks have passed, and my worst suspicions are beginning to be confirmed: We’ll never know the truth, because it is too dirty and monstrous to be exposed publicly. And yet, the only way to continue the path outlined by Kennedy would be precisely to make the truth known . . . You see, Camus was right: Everything is quite absurd, there are no historical laws, no real causality, no order at all. A crazy gang of murderers kills a man in whose hands rest the balance of the world, and everything is radically upset. Things look more or less stabilized now, but just imagine a new Sarajevo . . . Why not? When everything depends on a finger pressing a trigger (or a button, of course, I am so old-fashioned!) . . . Well, I never loved Kennedy, but I was sure he was fundamentally honest of mind. Khrushchev knew that, Castro knew that. In the light of the Texan atmosphere (which, after all, reflects a wide sector of the U.S.A.), Kennedy’s fight for peace looks almost heroic. Maybe you have a quite different opinion. I speak from afar, from another world. But something tells me I may be right.

Well, Sara and Pablo, merry Christmas to you both, with love from Aurora and cronopio Julio. I’ll write again when I have corrected the Prizewinners.

A big hug and many good wishes,

Julio

Do you believe Oswald killed Kennedy? I do not. He was framed, I’m sure. (But, of course, I’m not Edgar Hoover.)

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JULIO CORTÁZAR was born in Brussels in 1914 and grew up on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. His works include Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, Hopscotch, Blow-Up and Other Stories, From the Observatory, and Cronopios and Famas. He died in Paris in 1984.

ANNE MCLEAN lives in Toronto, where she translates Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings by authors including Héctor Abad, Javier Cercas, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez.