Chapter 177: ​​​​Treasures in Unlikely Places

Growing up in Southwest Mexico in the 1960s, my mother often said she owed her lifelong passion for reading to an unlikely source. At that time, in a place and context where she was famished for words to set her eyes on, long before the digital feast, and with the nuns doing the schooling, she cherished what she could get her hands on. Most of the time, this consisted of the monthly installments of selections from The Reader’s Digest translated into Spanish.

A quick look at old covers of that family-oriented consumer magazine hints at an eclectic haul. On any given cover, it featured articles such as The Power of Women Over Men, Between the Jaws of a Shark, Mysterious Beirut Where Money Flows, and The Magic of Human Contact. Slick or highbrow it was not, but scarcity and novelty whet the appetite. Those pages both kindled her interest and, quite simply, provided that dose of writing she found she couldn’t do without. “I devoured everything that was printed; it was the avidity for words,” she remembers. Decades later, she’ll insist she did find actual treasure there, however improbable, that led her to enduring interests elsewhere. Having benefitted from her bookshelf, I’m inclined to believe her.

One of the pleasures of youthful reading is precisely that unformatted curiosity. There is usually scarce method to the first pangs of the reading compulsion, neither discriminating by author nor publisher.. If the poet Osip Mandelstam once said that, in his Divine Comedy, Dante had expressed his thoughts as if “on official paper,” the same cannot be true of all worthwhile prose. Good writers will sometimes write, or have written, just about anywhere. Taken literally, there are the examples of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o writing Devil on the Cross on prison toilet paper, or Robert Walser scribbling his Microscripts on receipts and envelopes. More generally, precious work can often be found in improbable places.

Some years ago, I interviewed the Mexican journalist Lydiette Carrión on her book La fosa de agua [The Water Grave], a crucial investigation into femicides in the outskirts of Mexico City. I was surprised to learn that the basis for her work had first appeared in a tabloid, one more known to favor featuring bikini-clad models, sports, or violent imagery than her in-depth and nuanced journalism. For Carrión, that was the point: "It's a very masculine publication, with all the problems of a popular newspaper... quality journalism is still concentrated in the elite, and there is none for the working class. My interest in journalism has always been social: a lever for social transformation." It might not have been the medium that would get shared on social platforms or bring her accolades from influential subscribers, but here was the actual place and audience to exert change, a publication whose readership breathed the geography she covered.

Much like non-fiction, fiction also teaches us that there is a world before and beyond the usual suspects of our literary diet where gems can be found. Some genres are more prone to this, such as Raymond Chandler’s early hardboiled noir stories at home in pulp crime magazines or Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury’s speculative fiction in fanzines.

Discovering the joys certain authors can bring us before they become evident, commercially or otherwise, might require substantial leaps of faith. Roberto Bolaño’s initial poems were in publications so obscure, so marginal, that they and their readers might have been fiction, as indeed they all became when featured in Bolaño’s later novels. Likewise, Marcel Proust, who went on to write one of the most intricate and long novels in history, In Search of Lost Time (around 3,616 pages, in the Penguin edition), first mused on time and nostalgia in the short-lived journal Le Banquet. Anyone who might have gambled and been rewarded with his prose will have been quick about it: Le Banquet disappeared the year after it was founded. And yet, the first nuggets are there. “A day comes when we understand that tomorrow cannot be otherwise than yesterday, since that is of what it is made,” he writes in 1892.

Even when Proust makes it to the comparatively lofty pages of the daily Le Figaro, the articles can seem as far from his monolith work as the moon was from his room. You don’t usually expect to find the seeds of a masterpiece in the newspaper…and you’d be wrong, on this account, because the fading world of salons he depicts, the very individuals he chronicles there, will later become the characters he turns to in his Search. The “I” that dawns in the articles is the condition for the one that will later narrate the seven volumes that make his fame. Even then, lest we forget, the fact that the series exists is because sufficient readers gambled when editors wouldn’t: the first volume having been rejected, Proust bit the bullet and decided to self-publish.

Much of the writing that reaches us on any given week will often coalesce into a certain number of household publishing names, newspapers, and magazines seen as guarantors of quality. With books, it’s an ever-larger conglomerate of editorial houses that straddle continents and languages – bless independent publishers, with their quixotic belief in varied tastes and literature in translation. The internet has multiplied the platforms while blurring the paths to find them. To do so often depends on chance, on friends, on newsletters that curate the gems strewn across the internet. Even then, some places may still seem too unlikely.

Two cases in point deserve mention. Much like Reader’s Digest, they are consumer magazines, which would not, at first glance, seem prone to harbor treasures. The first is El Hogar [The Home], founded in Argentina in 1904, which defined itself as “a magazine especially dedicated to families” and committed to “always preserve its moralizing spirit.” Its content leaned toward articles for “the woman of today,” offering guidance on how she should cook, care for her family, and the appropriate manner to drive a car, as well as providing news, stories, and assorted entertainment. The latter did not shun culture, in between ads for Hinds facial cream and “fortifiers.”

Into this, in 1936, came Jorge Luis Borges, as close to the definition of the erudite writer as you can find, fluent in Latin and partial to teaching himself Arabic and old Anglo-Saxon. If it was a marriage of convenience within a set format, the resulting texts are not hackwork, and nor should they be. Whether reviewing foreign literature or writing short biographies of writers, championing Virginia Woolf (then very much alive), or sharing his interest in H.G. Wells, Borges is making readers partake in his passion, wherever they may meet. His collaboration with El Hogar lasted three years, right before the publication of some of his best work.

The second case takes place in Sweden, where Stig Dagerman, already famous in his country but afflicted with writer’s block, receives a request from the editors of Husmordern – “Housewife” in Swedish. He is asked to write “something on the art of living” at a time when he is struggling with depression and suicide. The resulting seven-page essay, published in issue 13, 1952, is one of his best works. Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable goes on to be a cult text, translated into ten languages, inspiring adaptations across the world, from songs to the theater and a movie.

It reads: “I have no belief and because of that I can never be a happy man. Because happy men should never fear that their lives drift meaninglessly toward the certainty of death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth from where I can attract a god’s attention. Nor have I inherited the skeptic’s well-hidden rage, the rationalist’s barren mind, or the atheist’s burning innocence. But I would not dare to cast a stone at those who believe in what I doubt, much less at those who idolize doubt as if that too were not surrounded by darkness. That stone would strike me instead, for there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable.”

The point is not that these “serious” writers were willing to provide quality work for publications others may have smirked at. It is just as valuable that the magazines sought them, and in Dagerman’s case, saw the value of a piece to which they could well have said was not “quite right” for their publication, or employed the well-worn I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass, doesn’t quite overlap with what we need, and other stock phrases. Sometimes, the condition for a work is the possibility of it existing somewhere, however unexpected.

This isn't to say that the next time you visit the dentist requires the careful study of that mysterious stack of magazines that only seem to exist there, in hopes of unearthing a marvel, or to rush to buy all the yellow-papered leaflets being hopefully waved on the street. But, as a critic once said of the long gestation of Proust’s work: the story of a novel is a novel in itself. There’s a story behind every article, and you never know the paths that led it there.

One final case to illustrate this: Irène Némirovsky was one of the darlings of France’s interwar period, a time when she published incessantly and to great acclaim. Then came the war, the German invasion, and the racial laws banishing anyone considered Jewish from liberal professions. Némirovsky is among them, and her editor cancels the publication of her next novel. “I'm struggling to save my livelihood and that of my children. But I'm beginning to believe it's impossible,” she writes in December 1940.

As all doors close around her, she turns to an old acquaintance in an improbable place. Némirovsky has already written for Gringoire, when it could still be considered a literary publication of the center-right. By 1940, it is firmly far-right and anti-Semitic. George Orwell defines it as “a Fascist weekly” and “a piece of rubbish” in an article in Tribune. And yet, Horace de Carbuccia, its founder, admires Némirovsky while propagating the ideas that condemn her and her family. He agrees to publish her without using her name. And so it is that Gringoire’s readership, full of “patriots” and supporters of Franco-German collaboration, are treated to eight stories and one novel by Némirovsky between 1940 and February 1942, five months before her deportation to Auschwitz. Gringoire ceased to exist in 1944, along with the government it had espoused. The unlikely treasures whose publication it accepted are very much still in print.

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