Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman His Life and Fictions.
By Suzanne
Jill Levine.
Illustrated.
448 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus
& Giroux. $27.50.
Recent Review in the New York Times
Saved by Rita Hayworth
Date: August 13, 2000, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Mario Vargas Llosa
Lead: Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman His Life and Fictions.
By Suzanne Jill
Levine.
Illustrated.
448 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus
& Giroux. $27.50.
Of all the writers
I have known, the one who seemed least interested in literature was Manuel
Puig
(1932-90). He
never talked about authors or books, and when a literary topic came up
in conversation
he would look
bored and change the subject. In ''Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman,''
her
well-researched
and carefully documented biography, Suzanne Jill Levine asserts that at
certain
moments in his
life Puig read a great deal, but her own book seems to contradict this
in creating the
background of
her subject; the most frequent references are to films, actresses, performances
and,
very often,
popular music. Only rarely, like poor relations, do any authors appear
(usually the person,
not the work).
A young Argentine writer who visited him in Rio de Janeiro was surprised
to find that in
Puig's apartment,
where he had acquired a video library of some 3,000 films, there were only
a handful
of books; aside
from his own works in Spanish and in translation, these consisted almost
exclusively of
biographies
of film producers and actresses.
He was not an
uncultured writer. On the contrary, he was very knowledgeable, not about
literature but
about films
and all the mythology and gossip connected to them. He was a man of the
movies, or
perhaps of visual
images and fantasy, who found himself shipwrecked in literature almost
by default.
Levine relates
how Puig came to his literary vocation gradually and almost by accident;
after his
frustrations
as a film student in Italy and his failed attempts to have his scripts
produced and to find
work as a director,
he moved almost imperceptibly from writing for the elusive screen to writing
for
himself, composing
an autobiographical text based on his childhood memories of the tales he
had seen
in the movie
houses of General Villegas, a small town on the Argentine pampa. Over the
years the text
evolved into
his first novel, ''Betrayed by Rita Hayworth'' (1968). With this book he
began a sui generis
literary career
that a few decades later would catapult him into worldwide fame, thanks
to the
extraordinary
success of the stage and film versions of his most popular novel, ''Kiss
of the Spider
Woman'' (1976).
Puig's work,
consisting of eight novels, is among the most original of the final years
of the 20th century.
Its originality
does not lie in the subjects, the style or even the structure of his narratives,
though these
often display
superb skill and subtle intelligence, but in the materials he used to create
them -- the types
and stereotypes
of popular culture: cheap romances; radio and television soap operas; the
fierce
melodrama of
boleros, tangos and rancheras; gossip columns; the scandals reported in
the
sensationalist
press and, above all, the pseudoreality created by the situations, the
characters and the
dreams of the
movies. This had been depicted previously in literature, in thousands of
ways, but always
as one more
element in a complex human reality. The innovation in Puig's work is that
the artificial,
caricatured
version of life eliminates and replaces the other dimension and becomes
the only truth. It is
this that gives
his novels their strange ambience; though Puig's vision is based on one
of the most
common human
experiences -- the flight from the real world to a dream world using all
the forms of
the imagination
-- it seems distant, ornate, unreal. Yet, at their best, his intricate
plots and convoluted
games breathe
an air of lived drama and suffering humanity.
The explanation
is simple: as Levine's biography makes clear, Puig learned as a child that
human
beings had devised
a method for escaping temporarily from the hardship and misery of this
world, and
he systematically
appropriated fiction until it became his way of life. Not the fiction of
books, but the
films he went
to see every day with his mother, Male, the most important figure in his
life, in the movie
theaters of
General Villegas. The movies opened the doors of unreality to him; gradually
he converted
that refuge
into his private, almost permanent residence, a place where he could feel
protected and be
himself, safe
from any danger he did not freely choose to confront, surrounded only by
those sublime,
stirring, exciting
movie stars whose presence enriched him and compensated for a sordid reality.
For
every sensitive
child, real life tends to be a harsh, continual trial, especially in a
small South American
town saturated
with machismo and savage prejudices, and for a boy who, as he matures,
discovers his
homosexuality
-- a brand of shame that will make him a pariah condemned to hostility,
violence and
ridicule from
classmates and acquaintances and contempt from his own family. This environment
was
unlivable for
this boy who was assaulted at school and who liked to dress up as a girl;
and so, with the
unwitting help
of his adored mother, who was a devoted movie fan, he developed the ability
to live in it
as little as
possible and devote most of his time, energy and imagination to the world
of films.
The degree to
which Puig felt at home in the fictional world of celluloid images is demonstrated
by this
marvelous anecdote:
It is midnight in New York in 1978. The Spanish cameraman Nestor Almendros,
a close friend,
had just arrived from Paris, and Puig presses him to come to his apartment
to talk about
movies even
though Almendros has already comfortably settled in for the night in his
hotel room.
Almendros agrees,
and the conversation lasts for hours. At about 2 a.m. an impassioned Puig
sings the
praises of Lana
Turner, whom he called a ''sensitive woman'' who tried to do her job. Almendros
replies that
he thinks she is ''a lousy actress, a whore'' and says that he despises
her. Puig opens the
door and throws
him out: ''A person who hates Lana can't remain under my roof. You're like
all the
other French
women, nasty and bitter.'' With his suitcases under his arm, Almendros
has to leave and
find a cab in
the cold streets of Greenwich Village. For months after the argument the
two friends
were estranged.
Levine's biography
is filled with anecdotes, some amusing, like the one I've just recounted,
others
moving, even
tragic, all of them drawing a lively, convincing profile of the author
of ''The Buenos Aires
Affair'' (his
best novel, in my opinion). A good part of her research is based on Puig's
correspondence
with his family
-- his mother in particular, with whom he maintained a continuing, exhaustive
dialogue
regarding the
movies he saw and the lives and miracles of Hollywood actresses, which
he followed
with religious
devotion -- and with many friends. As a consequence, her book documents
in great detail
the genesis
of each of Puig's works as well as his private life, his residences in
Argentina, Italy, the
United States,
Mexico and Brazil, and his constant travels throughout the world. Countless
writers,
actors, directors,
musicians, editors and adventurers from at least half a dozen countries
show up in its
pages, giving
her book the air of an immense and entertaining fresco of the comings and
goings, the
intrigues, failures
and accomplishments of literary and artistic fauna on both sides of the
Atlantic in the
1970's and 80's.
The rich homosexual life of the period appears as well, sizzling with anecdotes,
for
Puig gave himself
over to that life with almost as much passion as he brought to films. He
had
innumerable
relationships, from casual encounters -- Levine's gimlet eye has discovered
that Puig's
''many conquests''
included Stanley Baker and Yul Brynner -- to liaisons of several months'
duration.
But he never
could form a stable relationship, though he always longed for one. (In
his later years he
complained bitterly
of having spent his life ''in an unsuccessful search for a good husband.'')
These
circumstances
contributed to the sense of solitude that seems to have enveloped him in
his youth,
intensified
over time and practically turned into a neurosis at the end of his life.
This fascinating
book is indispensable for anyone interested in Puig's work (which Levine,
the
translator of
several of his novels into English, knows to perfection) and in the close
connection
between film
and literature, a defining characteristic of cultural life in the late
20th century; both are
described with
intelligence and an abundance of information. I found occasional errors,
but these in no
way diminish
the virtues of a book in which rigor and readability walk arm in arm.
Still, having
recognized these virtues, I ask myself if Puig's writing has the revolutionary
transcendence
attributed to
it by Levine and other critics. I'm afraid it doesn't; I believe it is
more ingenious and
brilliant than
profound, more artificial than innovative, and too dependent on the fashions
and myths of
its time to
ever achieve the permanence of great literary works like those of a Borges
or a Faulkner.
Great books,
unlike great movies, are not made of images but of words -- that is, ideas
that grow from
a series of
images and eventually constitute a vision of the world, of life, of the
human condition, of the
flow of history.
This vision blossoms in the reader's spirit, summoned by an intellectual
effort called to
life by the
richness and effectiveness of a language and a style, and produces the
fascination of a
literary work.
In Puig's writing there are careful, skillfully constructed images but
no ideas, no central
vision that
organizes and gives significance to the fictional world, no personal style.
There are
phantoms and
displays of wit, some shadow puppets that the writer's formal sleight of
hand
occasionally
endows with a semblance of reality, but then, a few pages later, they vanish
like the
waterfalls in
a mirage. Life never actually breaks through: it is cut off by superficiality,
an attitude that
confounds substance
with appearance and, in an inversion of values, gives priority to seeming,
not
being.
Because of these
characteristics, Puig's work may be the best representative of what has
been called
light literature,
which is emblematic of our time -- an undemanding, pleasing literature
that has no other
purpose than
to entertain. This literature rejects as arrogant and stupid the effort
of those wide-ranging
authors who
believed that writing could change the world, revolutionize life, transform
values, teach
how to feel
or how to live. No, no, none of that. Literature must accept how unimportant
books are
now in people's
lives and not set itself impossible goals; accept that entertainment --
helping a person to
pass the time
in a pleasant, absorbing, engaging way, as the most popular movies and
television
programs do
-- fulfills a respectable, honorable function, which is the task of literature
in a fast-moving,
preoccupied
time like ours. With so much work, so many pressing concerns, so many pleasures
and
diversions,
our citizens hardly have the time to become serious and reflect, or to
read novels that may
give them a
headache.
Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.