Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) Read Free

be any heavily built man.
    In 1948, while continuing to publish
Modern Argentina
,
Edelmira launched a new magazine,
American Letters
, giving her
children, Juan and Luz, editorial control. Shortly afterward, she left for
Europe, where she would remain until 1955. It has been suggested that an
irreconcilable enmity between Edelmira and Eva Peron was the cause of this long
exile. Nevertheless, many photographs from the period show the two women
together at cocktail and birthday parties, receptions, opening nights, and
sporting events. Evita, in all likelihood, could not get beyond page ten of
Poe’s Room
, and Edelmira would certainly not have approved of the
first lady’s social background, but documents and letters written by third
parties indicate that they had embarked upon shared projects, such as the
creation of a major museum of contemporary Argentinean art (to be designed by
Edelmira and the young architect Hugo Bossi), including artist residences, with
a full catering service, a feature quite unique among the great museums of the
world, the aim being to facilitate the creative work—and daily life—of young and
not-so-young exponents of modern painting, and consequently to prevent their
emigration to Paris or New York. Some people claim to have seen a film script
drafted by the two ladies, about the life and misfortunes of an innocent young
Don Juan (to be played by Hugo del Carril), but like so many other things, the
draft has been lost.
    What we know for certain is that Edelmira did not return to Argentina
until 1955, by which time the rising star in literary Buenos Aires was her
daughter, Luz Mendiluce.
    Edelmira’s later years were not prolific. Apart from her
Collected
Poems
(the first volume appeared in 1962, the second in 1979), she was
to publish only three more books: a volume of memoirs,
The Century as I Have
Lived It
(1968), written with the help of the ever-faithful Carozzone;
followed by a collection of very short stories,
Churches and Cemeteries of
Europe
(1972), distinguished by the author’s abundant common sense;
and, finally, a gathering of unpublished early poems,
Fervor
(1985).
    In her roles as patroness of the arts and promoter of young talent,
however, Edelmira remained as active as ever. Countless volumes included a
foreword, a preface or an afterword by the widow Mendiluce; she also personally
financed the first editions of innumerable works. Of the books for which she
wrote prefaces, two deserve a special mention:
Stale Hearts and Young
Hearts
by Julián Rico Anaya, a novel which provoked a heated
controversy both in Argentina and abroad on its publication in 1978, and
The
Invisible Adorers
, by Carola Leyva, a collection of poems intended to
put an end to the sterile poetry debate that had been going on in certain
Argentinean circles since the
Second Surrealist Manifesto
. Among the
books she subsidized, two titles stand out indisputably:
The Kids of Puerto
Argentino
, a perhaps somewhat exaggerated memoir of the Falklands War,
which catapulted the ex-soldier Jorge Esteban Petrovich to literary prominence,
and
The Darts and the Wind
, an anthology of work by young, well-bred
poets whose aesthetic objectives included avoiding cacophony, vulgar
expressions, and ugly-sounding words, and which, with its preface by Juan
Mendiluce, sold unexpectedly well.
    Edelmira spent the last three years of her life on her ranch in Azul,
either in the Poe room, where she would doze and dream of the past, or out on
the broad terrace of the main ranch house, absorbed in a book or contemplating
the landscape.
    She remained lucid (or “furious,” as she liked to say) to the end.

J UAN M ENDILUCE T HOMPSON
    Buenos Aires, 1920–Buenos Aires, 1991
    A s the second child of
Edelmira Thompson, Juan realized at an early age that he could do whatever he
liked with his life. He tried his hand at sports (he was a passable tennis
player and an appalling race-car driver), patronized the arts (or rather
fraternized