In March 1968, on the eve of traveling to Belgrade as cultural attaché of his country, Sergio Pitol began a diary. The habit of keeping it, soon turning into an addiction, is the thread that weaves the more than two decades he spent living in various European cities, building a career as a diplomat while pursuing his path as a writer. Over time, the diary would become the “training ground” from which his books would ravenously feed.
At Zenda we reproduce the opening of the prologue written by Ignacio Echavarría to Diaries, 1968-1980 (Anagrama), by Sergio Pitol.
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PROLOGUE
I
Are all diaries lamentable? Are they interesting only for that reason?
Elias Canetti
“I write a diary. I started it thirty-five years ago, in Belgrade. It is my quarry, my storehouse, my piggy bank. From its pages my novels ravenously feed.” These are the words of Sergio Pitol, written on July 22, 2003 and collected in The Wizard of Vienna (2005). The diary to which he alludes began Pitol to write in March 1968, shortly before undertaking a journey to Europe in which both his dedication to diplomacy and his vocation as a writer would become clear.
Nobody who has engaged with Pitol’s work is unaware of the importance his diary assumes in it not only as a quarry and laboratory for his short stories and essays, but as a “form” or literary mold, that is, as the channel of a mode of writing determined—or rather undetermined—by temporality, fragmentation, and personal experiences. The diary, in fact, takes on a substantial role in the last and most successful stage of Pitol’s career as a writer, the one that begins with The Art of the Escape (1996) and extends to the end of his life. But already long before, the diary formula contributes to explaining the way Pitol’s narrative writing tends to take shape.
Before 1968, Pitol made occasional attempts to keep a diary (in Rome, in Beijing…), but none of them had continuity. What did have continuity, however, was the one begun in March 1968, in which he persisted with increasing momentum until his definitive return to Mexico, toward the end of the eighties. This diary, begun when he had just turned thirty-five years old (“nel mezzo del cammin…”), and which spans more than two decades, is the one that finally sees the light in the edition presented here, in three volumes.
This first volume is, of the three, the one that covers the longest period (a little more than twelve years) and the one that features the greatest number of cities and destinations. Here we witness the slow and progressive conquest, not only of his paths as a storyteller, but of the habit of writing a diary, which at first bears a strong mark of self-imposed discipline, but which over time will become little less than an addiction.
Throughout these pages, there are many notes about the diary itself and about the function it serves for its author, both in relation to his literary writing and to his intellectual and emotional economy. Not long after he began it, Pitol makes it clear to himself that diary writing responds in part to the difficulty of finding time to write. A difficulty that he himself attributes, at bottom, to the fear of confronting the task, “fear of failure, of achieving only an acceptable mediocrity” (March 13, 1968).
His initial purpose—and to a certain extent achieved—is to keep the diary apart from “the temptation to make literature”: “Record only data, stripped of all palabrero frills” (April 10, 1968). A determination that, for quite some time, would raise doubts about the meaning of what he did: “Why do I write this diary? For loneliness? For exhibitionism? For professional reasons?” (January 7, 1971). Moreover, the form resists him; he struggles to find the type of observations and experiences that he should record: “Days pass, and days, and in them thousands of things I do not note” (January 26, 1973). Pitol does not take long to realize that, if he is not careful, the diary becomes a sinkhole of “complaints, frustration, irritations, fears, laments” (December 13, 1974). On the other hand, his nomadic life, the frequent visits he receives and—already embarked on his diplomatic career—the habit of taking the diary to the offices of the successive embassies where he is posted, where he sometimes keeps it, quickly fosters fears that it will be read by others.
This prospect alarms him to the extent that, despite his natural discretion and reserve, he is determined to entrust the diary with matters of his intimacy he prefers not to publish, including his homosexual orientation and the multiple erotic and amorous episodes it leads to. Without a doubt this aspect of the diary is one of the most revealing of Pitol’s personality and biography, and the one that most flagrantly brings to light the private character of diary writing for him, at least until the moment—rather late—when he begins to consider publishing it. The possibility of making his homosexuality public, or making it more or less evident in his narrations, with the added risk that this could pose for his diplomatic career, was a question that Pitol mulled over for many years, and which often surfaces in these diaries, for example, when he reads certain texts by E. M. Forster (homosexual like him) or when he weighs publishing or not The Only Argument, the only one of his stories in which he reveals his homosexuality in a relatively explicit way (and which would finally see the light in 1980).
In The Wizard of Vienna, referring to his years in the Mexican Foreign Service, which are the ones covered here, Pitol says: “my diary records in those years a permanent interest in writing” (p. 622). That interest became even more pressing given that after the publication of The Ringing of a Flute (1972), he suffered, as a writer, a prolonged drought. “In that spell of impotence I traced in my diary projects, fragments of novels, truncated dialogues, descriptions of characters, mountains of details, but when I began to organize those materials, the story told in Floral Games intervened like an evil ghost, and everything coagulated” (p. 622). Thus, the main reason Pitol finds to persevere in his diary is—as he writes in the entry of April 24, 1975—to make notes intended to “remember some data” that may later serve him for the short stories and novels he has in mind and plans to write.
With this purpose, already in the same year 1975 he begins to make occasional reviews of the material accumulated; reviews that, by 1977, after an exhaustive rereading of all the diaries he has written to date, move him to conclude, with some surprise, that taken together his entries form “a small narrative.” Pitol notes how “the novel projects” poured into his diaries “acquire, at least as it seemed to me, the character of fictional characters” (May 24, 1977). It happens in this way that from the prolonged morass that those projects suffer, there emerges unexpectedly the prospect of a writing that integrates and arranges the material from the diaries; a prospect that excites Pitol particularly, as shown by the entry of June 14, 1977: “In principle I am thrilled by the idea of developing that struggle of themes that strive to win the chance to be created and become contaminated until they end up creating a single narrative.”
Slowly and stealthily, this perspective will help to unlock the prolonged creative paralysis that Pitol endures through almost the entire decade of the seventies, and will open the channel through which, shortly after, the major stories gathered in Nocturnal Nocturnal of Bujara (1981), the final drafting of the oft-postponed Floral Games (1982), the Carnival Triptych (1984-1991) and, much later, the so-called Memory Trilogy (1996-2005), consisting of The Art of the Escape, The Journey (2000) and The Wizard of Vienna. But the diaries are far from being a mere seedbed of topics and matters to be addressed later in his writing. In an entry of May 20, 1977, in which he says that he has read his entire diary, Pitol succeeds in listing the “constants” of the diary as follows:
- The dreams, with their constant reiteration of guilt.
- Projects of writing that do not get fulfilled.
- The irritation I feel toward some colleagues at work.
- The lovers […]. Constant complaints, with the corresponding promise to amend, for loafing, for drinking too much, for my dissipated life.
References to some readings and performances. Travel plans, rarely realized. Comments about friends, which do not reveal the nature of my relationships with them, for the notes in this diary have a whining tone that would lead one to think that my life is a misfortune, and it is not; that my friends are a nuisance, which is also not true.
The reader will have the opportunity to verify to what extent these constants recur throughout the diaries edited here. As is also repeated, in each city to which Pitol has been assigned, the tendency to idealize the previous one, or the new one in which he would like to reside. The fierce critique of his own literary works recurs, as do lists of books to read and comments on those already read; the record of his incessant commitments as a translator, the inventory of his ailments and illnesses, the places he aspires to visit, the laments about the incessant harassment by the “termites” (as he calls all those people who pester him for any reason, diverting him from his tasks), or the critical asides about current events, which Pitol always judges from an unmistakably left-wing perspective. All of these constants stem from a core endeavor: “to write what I am without softening, so I can feel free of guilt” (May 20, 1977). An endeavor that confronts the dilemma already mentioned: “Would I feel better only by admitting that I am homosexual?” “I think so,” Pitol answers himself. But only in the diary will he be able to act accordingly. Besides, despite his continual troubles, Pitol never loses the thread that binds everything together, and on November 12, 1977, in an entry commenting on his recent reading of a book by Simone de Beauvoir,
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Author: Sergio Pitol. Title: Diarios, 1968-1980: Belgrado, Barcelona, Bristol, Varsovia, París, Budapest. Moscú. Publisher: Anagrama.