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

with bohemians and criminals, until prevented from doing so by his
father and his vigorous older brother, whose prohibitions were backed up by
threats and occasional violence), and studied law, before turning to
literature.
    At the age of twenty he published his first novel,
The
Egoists
, a tale of mystery and youthful exaltation, set in London,
Paris and Buenos Aires. The events are precipitated by an apparently
insignificant occurrence: a mild-mannered family man suddenly shouts at his
wife, ordering her to take the children and leave the house immediately, or put
them in a room and lock the door. He then locks himself in the bathroom. After
an hour the woman emerges from the locked room in which she has obediently taken
refuge, goes to the bathroom and finds her husband dead, with a razor in his
hand and his throat slit. This suicide, which seems at first an open and shut
case, is investigated by a Scotland Yard detective with a passion for
spiritualism, and by one of the dead man’s sons. The investigation takes more
than fifteen years and serves as a pretext for introducing a gallery of
characters, including a young French neo-royalist and a young German Nazi, who
are allowed to discourse at length and seem to serve as the author’s
mouthpieces.
    The novel was a success (by 1943, four editions had sold out in
Argentina, and sales were strong in Spain, as well as in Chile, Uruguay and
other Latin American countries), but Juan Mendiluce decided to forego literature
in favor of politics.
    For a time he considered himself to be a Falangist and a follower of
José Antonio Primo de Rivera. He was anti-USA and anti-capitalist. Later he
became a Peronist and held important government posts at the capital and in the
province of Córdoba. His career in public service was impeccable. With the
demise of Peronism his political inclinations underwent a further
transformation: he turned pro-USA (in fact, the Argentinean Left accused him of
publishing twenty-five CIA agents in his magazine—an exaggerated figure, by any
reckoning), became a partner in one of the major legal firms in Buenos Aires,
and was finally appointed ambassador to Spain. On his return from Madrid he
published a novel,
The Argentinean Horseman
, in which he bewailed the
spiritual poverty of the contemporary world, the decline of piety and
compassion, and the incapacity of the modern novel, particularly in its crude
and aimless French manifestations, to understand suffering and so to create
characters.
    He became known as the Argentinean Cato. He fought with his sister,
Luz Mendiluce, over control of the family magazine. Having won the fight, he
tried to lead a crusade against the lack of feeling in the contemporary novel.
To coincide with the publication of his third novel,
Springtime in
Madrid
, he launched a campaign against francophilia, the cult of
violence, atheism and foreign ideas.
American Letters
and
Modern
Argentina
served as platforms, along with the various Buenos Aires
dailies, which were keen to publish, although sometimes flabbergasted by, his
denunciations of Cortázar, whom he described as unreal and bloodthirsty, and
Borges, whose stories, so he claimed, were “parodies of parodies” and whose
lifeless characters were derived from worn-out traditions of English and French
literature, clearly in decline, “repeating the same old plots ad nauseam.” His
attacks took in Bioy Casares, Mujica Lainez, Ernesto Sabato (who, in his eyes,
personified the cult of violence and gratuitous aggression), Leopoldo Marechal
and others.
    He was to publish three more novels:
Youthful Ardor
, a look
back to the Argentina of 1940;
Pedrito Saldaña the Patagonian
, a story
of adventures in the south, a cross between Stevenson and Conrad; and
Luminous Obscurity
, a novel about order and disorder, justice and
injustice, God and the Void.
    In 1975, he gave up literature once again in favor of politics. He
served the Peronist and military governments with equal