Summer readings: Victoria Ocampo, writer

This year two important anniversaries are fulfilled for national literature: the 90 years of the Foundation of the Argentine Academy of Letters and the foundation of the South magazine.It seems appropriate to celebrate both facts with a text dedicated to Victoria Ocampo (V. O.), founder of the aforementioned publication, of the South Editorial;and first woman to enter as a number academic in this institution.

The life of V. O. is so exciting, so rich in novel episodes and circumstances, that she has relegated what she has written about others, literature, art and, in truth, on her main subject: herself, the self that narratesAnd reflect.She tells very well what she tells and has a lot to count.Everything flows.Her writing leads directly to the subject.The architecture of her phrases and her stories has the same breath as the modern architecture of the houses and the buildings that she defended against the eclectic style of the École des Beaux Arts of Paris.Jean-Michel Frank, the great interior decorator of the 1930s, said that the houses of V. O. had a "moral elegance."Also her writings.

In the constructions of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, V. O. discovered that, in the twentieth century, the real luxury was space.The broad residence of her by Rufino de Elizalde, built by Bustillo, according to the wishes of the owner and the suggestions of Le Corbusier, is something like the manifesto of what modernity was for her.However, when her parents died and the five Ocampo sisters divided the inheritance, Victoria and Angélica stayed with Villa Ocampo.In that fifth designed and raised by her father, Victoria introduced few modifications, but she managed to give the whole a modern spirit, especially for the stripping in the decoration.

Victoria always fantasized about becoming an interpreter of the works she saw in the theater or read at her home. The prejudices of the time, of her class and her family, closed her actress's career, for which she was very endowed with her. At most, she was allowed to recite French poems at the parties and benefits of the high Buenos Aires class; but she always kept her innate histrionism. Over the years, she came to recite the text of the Oratory Le Roi David, by Arthur Honegger, directed by Ernest Ansermet, in El Colón; and of Persephone, by Igor Stravinsky, directed by the composer, also in the Columbus, and later in Rio de Janeir Most important theatrical actresses in France, Marguerite Moreno. The fact of studying poems with an artist like that made Victoria understand very well the writing of poets such as Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud; and also that she deepens the sense of her rhythm.

For a long time, Ocampo wrote his writings in French because it was the language in which he was taught to read and write.Then someone helped him translate them.José Bianco, the intelligent and sagazo "Pepe", author of shadows usually dress and the loss of the kingdom, South Drafting Secretary from 1938 to 1961, was the one who was in some occasions in some occasions to fulfill that task.Her and her styles were very different, but they had an aesthetic coincidence: llaneza.Victoria incorporated many elements of colloquial speech, without ever falling into the vulgar or the chabacanería.

The need to express what I thought and what I felt led to Victoria, from very early, to write cards almost compulsively. The correspondence she had in adolescence with Delfina Bunge de Gálvez, already married to the writer Manuel Gálvez, and almost ten years older than her, was very important in her maturation. Delfina had passed and passed through her victory friend of her. The two defended the rights of women and suffered male oppression. Ocampo married Luis Bernardo de Estrada ("Monaco"), belonging to a family of strong Catholic tradition. She and he did not ignore that, beyond the intense physical attraction, they had little in common. Almost in everything they thought the opposite. Ocampo did not tolerate her husband's ultraconservative mentality and, after several years of a marriage that was only a facade, she separated from her. During her honeymoon, she had found the great love of her life, Julián Martínez, cousin of Monaco. He spent a lot of time before this love was realized.

If some of the letters from Victoria to Delfina are read, it is immediately noticed that the writer who would be the autobiography author is in gestation.In those messages the urgency of testifying to everything she cared, she loved and hated.Writing forced her to order and moderate her excessive vitality and her impulses.In addition, she needed to go to intelligent listening, such as Delfina, to be able to listen to herself.

The first book of V. O. was from Francesca to Beatrice, through the divine comedy; Of course, he wrote it in French, in 1921. The writer Ricardo Baeza translated him into Spanish. It was an essay, but also her first "testimony" of her, although she had not yet created that personal genre. Her intention was to serve as Cicerone - she compares with tourist guides - readers who avoided scholarly editions. That essay is the confession of what comedy meant for V: O. at some time in her life. She came to write: "I didn't read Dante, he lived it." She uses the word "confession" on purpose because the Florentine poet had served as a crucial period of her relationship with Julián Martínez, already legally separated from Monaco. Her passion between her and Julian had reached her zenith. What she would not end was the understanding she had found in that man. The story of that love began with an irresistible physical attraction. As she said of herself, she "was physiqued."

I met Victoria in the summer of 1963, in Mar del Plata. He liked the long walks along the beach at a good pace. One morning when we both shared one of those walks and we talked, I don't know what, she was abruptly interrupted to tell me: "How well taning are those men!" I, busy getting to the height of the reflections of my illustrious companion, felt like a student who was paying an exam, and some of that there was. Her comment, an accomplice wink, surprised me. I looked where she indicated with a head movement and I saw two very well tanned men, but, above all, they distinguished themselves by wearing matiné idol bet. Victoria shared her enthusiasm, above all, with whom they could understand them; Therefore, she seemed natural to get me into the "harvest" of her: "the tan." She did the same in her testimonies, with her portraits of Virginia Woolf, Lawrence of Arabia, Maurice Ravel; With his chronicles of extraordinary events such as the New York blackout in 1965, and with the facts that marked his life: the discovery of a new writer, of new musicians (the Beatles), the appearance of a new friend and the loss of the of his youth.

The next book of V. or was the Laguna de los Nenúfares, a scenic fable in twelve paintings, published in 1926 by the Magazine of the West.I don't think, today, she recommended that work to a reader or a spectator.However, many years later, in 1958, he wrote a piece destined for a show of light and sound, speaks the carob, which is the story of the fifth Pueyrredón, where many important characters from the time of independence passed andThe famous dialogues between Juan Martín de Pueyrredón and José de San Martín maintained.The piece is a prosopopeya.The centenary carob of the fifth, at the top of the Barrancas de San Isidro, is the one who tells everything that happened in the shadow of his foliage and establishes a counterpoint with another rapporteur.

The voices that recorded those dialogues were those of the most prominent actors of the national scene.But before that project was made, a sunny afternoon, probably a spring Saturday or Sunday - I am sure of that data, although I was there as a spectator -, the carob speaks for only once only time, I believe, in the fifth of Pueyrredón in the form of the theater read.In two balconies of the property were the interpreters.One of these was Victoria Ocampo, who decided to be the carob.The guest pubic listened under her balcony.The show "worked" very well from the dramatic point of view;He was very enjoyable and, at the same time, substantial.Victoria, radiant, transcended the scene (the balcony).She had magnetism.Her time and life had made her, in her life, a mythical character.

The most important literary works of the writer are the ten series of testimonies and her autobiography in six volumes, to which her correspondence should be added, for example, with Virginia Woolf, Gabriela Mistral, Ernest Ansermet and Roger Caillois, among others.Of her love life, Victoria wrote admirably and without reluctance in the branch of Salzburg, the third volume of her autobiography, in which she tells her relationship with the man she loved most, Julián Martínez;And the degrading situation that women had to endure, also those of their class, to love according to their wishes.

In another volume of autobiography, Victoria tells and reflects on the love bond that united Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, as well as what faced them: the opposite ways of thinking about the political situation of the 1930s: Berlin or Moscow; Hitler or Stalin. That bond was marked by the anguish and despair of that French intellectual, author of notable and extremely sensitive novels. He hated that great sensitivity attributed to him because he considered it a feature of weakness and latent homosexuality. He struggled to become a hard and, along that way, became a collaborator of the Nazis. In the Drieu La Rochelle case, which appears in the third series of testimonies, Victoria analyzes the personality of the man who had loved and for which she ended up being an irreplaceable friend: she was one of the three people to whom he sent a copy of His will and a personal letter few moments before committing suicide. Ocampo had the value, against all convenience, to explain to her friend, not to acquit him. Much later, when he had access to the newspapers, the horror caused by the opinions and political acts of the writer made him think that he did not know. In letters to Angelica she wrote what, really, she felt and thought about him. Her Angelica's sister had also been Pierre's lover, when he and Victoria had already gone from the love of friendship. She was the only one with which she could open at all. There is a difference between the two texts. Memories are a posthumous publication; That saved her the possibility of being "groped" in her life.

What conclusion arises from those two literary examples of very different loves, the one that V. O. felt for Julián and the one he felt for Drieu?The writer introduces readers in the most secret corners of her soul, but, on certain matters related to her present, she is silent;or she explains in texts that she reserves for posthumous publications.For example, she was silent about her's long love relationship with Eduardo Mallea,

With great reason, the literary professor and critic Enrique Pezoni, one of the people to whom V. O. most wanted, commented in a meeting that laughs, and anger as a relief, were two of the characteristic reactions of the writer. In her texts, the observations and scenes that arouse a smile abound; The anger, nuanced through humor, appears in the correspondence and in some essays such as his traveler and the shadows of his. Keyserling in my memoirs, from 1951, in which she recounts the misunderstanding with the Russian-Germanic philosopher. When she discovered the works of that wise thinker, she was dazzled. She began to send her daily letters so admiring that they seemed to worship. The princess of good taste became a comic character. That cult had nothing to do with love passion. Count Keyserling was not, by distraction, the type of man who could physically attract the Argentine parishioner. The giant Baltic, for his, not because of his South American meditations, as soon as he saw photographs of his follower, he felt urgency to grant him the privilege of physical care rather than his intellectual. She believed that he would correctly interpret the signs of spiritual interest that lavished her. Instead, the steep noble considered inevitable as the corollary of a theorem that the idolatry of Argentina culminated in a fusion of their souls and, above all, of her bodies. They first cited in the palatial Hôtel des Réservoirs, in Versailles.

That and deserted to be loved.https://t.co/8jchlvnmf2

— Hend Amry Sun Sep 06 13:31:22 +0000 2020

Everything that V. O. said in his book was the result of the fury caused by the Count's Body outbursts in Versailles and, later, in Buenos Aires, where she had committed to invite him.Repentant, but faithful to her word, she kept the invitation.Terrible error.I don't think Victoria had enough calm to realize the comic of those Buenos Aires adventures - she threw a iron in the head to the philosopher, without hitting him;He, on her part, told the Jockey partners that she was an Indian who threw poisoned arrows.

In the seventh series of testimonies, there is a sample, this time deliberate, of the sense of humor and irony of Victoria: "Jean Cocteau in New York."That text was written in 1963, after the death of the French poet.In it, the author tells him in New York, in 1948. They had not seen themselves in more than a decade, life and war had separated them.Jean, as she called him, invited her to have tea at the Saint-Regis hotel, where she stayed, and, suddenly, upset about the impersonal style of that room, proposed that they go to visit Lili Pons, the one heldand famous soprano.The story is spawning, but laughter is mixed with the melancholy of the past, visible on Cocteau's face and in the contrast between the new capital of the world and the destroyed Paris, where Jean and she had been young.

Victoria writes: “I had not heard such an effervescent French talk.The word of Cocteau, agile like his thought, took me by surprise, as if I had never tasted it.I talked it with a pleasure similar to the one to felt the hundred sugar crystals that cover those perfect draced dams that sell in white wood boxes in Paris creak between the teeth.I laughed out of pure taste.In a taste for the taste of France of all that. ”

Infected by the memory of his friend, fifteen years after that postwar appointment in a city that was not theirs (they would never see each other again), the writing of V. O. reaches in Spanish the effervescence of Jean in French to tell whatIt had passed in the luxurious department of Lili Pons.

On August 6, 1999, Héctor Bianciotti, born in Argentina, but a member of the French Academy and resident in Paris, gave a conference on Victoria Ocampo and Roger Caillois at the headquarters of the newspaper La Nación.One of the attendees asked what opinion of V. O. as a writer.Bianciotti was honest: "She was an extraordinary journalist, but you can't say she knew how to write."

There are few who think the same as him;Nor are few for whom V. O. was a journalist and very good writer.I am one of these.It seems unfair to affirm that she did not know how to write.It is a sample of literary misunderstanding.Bianciotti and she had very different styles.Ocampo's prose was deliberately flat and covered different records, including the popular, and Creole expressions.The elegance of the French academic was sometimes almost a boasting or an affectation;The Argentine academic was deliberately of the type "does not notice", like Chanel's.

When Ocampo entered this academy, in 1977, Ángel Battistessa, in his capacity as president of the institution, welcomed him.He said two very true things.The first: "No one has spoken with greater success of Victoria Ocampo than Victoria Ocampo itself."The second truth: "As in other writers of ours, Sarmiento, Cané, General Mansilla or Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson, even written, his, that of Victoria Ocampo, is an elocution that attracts with the niceness of what was discussed."

V. O. He began his response to Battistessa in a rare way: “Congratulations, first, members of the Argentine Academy of Letters;Then, to us, for the resolution they have taken to include women among their colleagues.I congratulate you first, because Motu Proprio has overcome a prejudice, and that always demands an effort. ”

He added one of the true and successful reasons of that designation: “Perhaps the long -standing character of the South magazine, founded a few months before the Academy.Forty -six years is a lot for a magazine and little for an academy.Richelieu's dates from 1635 ″.Deep lunge for the academy.

Already before 1977, an academic armchair had proposed to Ocampo and she refused because she was a self-taught, she considered himself a Franco-Chirper "and had no pasta for office" What was the change?She asked and answered that same question in the public discourse of acceptance of her: "Because they convinced me that my refusal could block them, momentarily the entrance to the academy whom I consider suitable for the position."With your frankness without turns, V. O. continued: "You, dear colleagues, know an inevitable adjustment that will benefit both of you and us."

I will make an appointment, the last one, one of the testimonies."Shakespeare or What You Will."It is the final paragraph: “… in the Kosofat Valley, I know that Shakespeare will bring me everything I liked in life.He will not have had time to shed of so much earthly beauty.And, when greeting it […], I feel since I will be saying my dear branch, my dear sky, my dear day, my dear night, my dear songs of rooster and chicharra, my dear smell of rain in the garden, my dear palms, my dear summer, my dear sea, my dear love. ”

The repetition of "My Dear" is an anaphora, accompanied by an enumeration, nothing chaotic like those of Borges, despite the fact that V. O. Mix trees, roosters, seasons of the year, seas ... that sequence has an increasingly fast pace and agoal.The reader leads to her as the walker, suddenly, after a dune, it flows into the ocean: "My dear love."

In "My dear love" is Victoria Ocampo, writer.

Graduated from the UBA Philosophy career, Hugo Beccacece is a writer, critic and journalist;He was editor of the culture supplement and adnculture magazine of this newspaper, where he continues to write;He is a member of the Argentine Academy of Letters