Three years ago, the book editor of this paper handed me a thick paperback book to review. Its cover featured an oil painting in shades of purple and melon of a Latina woman at a cafe table under the intriguing, half-absurd title, The Long Night of White Chickens. I accepted it, little knowing I was about to have a conversion experience.
My review of The Long Night of White Chickens began like this: “To be in love with a book is to exhibit all the classic symptoms of romantic obsession. Once you’ve begun, you can’t stop. You want to read it all the time, be with it, of it, in it. Yet at the same time, you don’t want to use it up too fast; like the lifespan of an affair, the length of your relationship with the book can be prolonged by self-restraint…. You dream of meeting the author, perhaps writing him a letter. But what would you say? Will you marry me? Will you come live in my mind and tell me stories for the rest of my life? And reduce the complex relationship you have with the book and its narrator to the one-dimensional exchange possible between fan and celebrity? Never.”
Never say never. Having more or less proposed to Francisco Goldman in this ecstatic review, I was first mortified, then tongue-tied, then horrifically bubbly when I had the opportunity to have dinner with him and a bunch of his cool New York literary friends (including his ex-wife and his then-girlfriend, both writers) in the city a couple of months later. I’m sure I made a fabulous impression on everyone. Intellectual worship is even worse than a regular crush in its ability to turn you into a stammering dork with the vocabulary and erudition of a high school dropout. Then just add vodka!
Goldman has just published his second novel, The Ordinary Seaman. After the numerous prizes racked up by White Chickens — including the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Sue Kaufman Award for fiction and that of the American Academy of Arts and Letters — the outpouring of critical acclaim from all quarters for the new book is fixing his place as one of the important fiction writers of his generation. Good news for the Jews — and the Central Americans.
In fact, Goldman’s significance in this regard is not unlike that of Tiger Woods in golf. Just as Woods is not — or not only — a black golfer, Goldman is not — or not only — a Latino writer. (Though as Goldman points out in the interview that follows, one’s facial features are to some extent one’s destiny.) Half Jewish, half Guatemalan, having made his home and set his works in Guatemala, Boston, New York City, and Mexico, Goldman cannot be categorized under any one label. He is an American figure rather than a North American one, his work an expression of cultural intermingling rather than strict ideas of ethnicity.
When Goldman came through town last month on tour for The Ordinary Seaman, I had the chance to drink Herradura shots at the Bitter End with the man and this time, at least, ask a few coherent questions.
Austin Chronicle: Describe your ethnic background.
Francisco Goldman: Both my parents are from immigrant families. My father, who is much older than my mom, is Russian Jewish. His older siblings were born in Russia, and he was born right after they got here in 1910 — before the Russian Revolution. He never talks about his childhood. He has zero nostalgia. He is a secular Jew, rather than a religious one.
My mother is a mestiza born in Guatemala; she was sent by my grandmother to live in the United States in the late ’40s to prevent an unsuitable marriage to a handsome, wild Italian who was chasing after her. She got a job in Boston as a bilingual secretary, but was always late for work — that’s a very Guatemalan trait, always being late for everything, and one that I share — and soon got fired. My father found her crying by the water cooler. As far as my grandmother was concerned, this marriage was even more unsuitable than the Italian. Frida Kahlo, by the way, had my exact same ethnic background.
AC: How did your Guatemalan heritage figure in your childhood?
FG: Well, I was raised by Latin American women: my mother, my grandmother, the woman on whom the character of Flor in Long Night of White Chickens is partly modeled. To this day I only speak in Spanish to my mother. As in White Chickens, my mom split shortly after I was born and took me and my sister down to Guatemala to live, and there we would have stayed if I hadn’t gotten tuberculosis. We went back to my dad when I was four. It was a terrible time for me — my illness, my parents’ rapprochement. When we came back, I spoke Spanish, not English, and we had been living in this marvelous, uproarious Spanish colonial house and I went from there to a hospital to a boxy ranch house in a bleak American suburb, quarantined on the couch in the basement.
But since 1978, I’ve spent more time in Latin America than I have here, so now, at 42, I have a very different sense of the kind of American I’ve become than, say, my own sister who works in a bank and has never really left Boston. I see this a lot, even with friends in families with two Latin parents, that aside from what your ethnic features and your name do to you in America, American society offers you choices. You can assimilate, and try to be a good American Republican office worker, or you can affirm your Latin identity. It’s up to you, to some extent. The problem is, once you pay the price of assimilation, you may find nobody wants you anyway.
AC: Do you think of yourself as a Latino writer?
FG: When I first started writing and publishing — I sold my first story to Esquire in ’79 — I had zero awareness of any community of Latino writers in the United States. The flowering that’s occurred since then — Oscar Hijuelos, Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcia, Sandra Cisneros, Dagoberto Gilb, Ana Castillo, Junot Diaz and many others — none of these people had started publishing yet. A national awareness of Latino writing began with our generation. Back then, I used to joke that if I had any place in the United States that was my own — my Yapnapatawfah County — it was Miami Airport, because that was the meeting point of the Latin Catholics coming in from the south and the New York Jews coming down from the north.
I used to give my characters names like John H. and Harry, and I probably would have loved to develop into a Calvino- or a Borges-type writer, but it wasn’t my true nature to be that abstract. What I began to realize is that I had an irresolvable split inside me. In the end, you can’t really be half Jewish and half Catholic, know what I mean? Or you can’t as a person, anyway. Perhaps you can as a writer. In the made-up world of literature, the split can be resolved.
As a writer, I was completely drunk on the Latin Americans — Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortazar, Borghes, of course, and Rulfo. I also loved the garrulous, brainy American Jewish guys — Bellow and Roth. And I thought that what I could do is to make myself some blend of these. At the time I wasn’t aware of Harold Bloom’s essay about the anxiety of influence, the point of which is that what makes a writer original is not that he comes up with something completely new — that’s impossible — but that his originality comes from blending opposite influences. For example, it’s obvious that Garcia Marquez was influenced by Faulkner, but what makes him so unique is that he was also influenced by Virginia Woolf.
I then spent the next 10 years — most of the Eighties — in a kind of apprenticeship to myself, living in my late grandmother’s house in Guatemala City and trying to absorb all these different influences: Central America, the war, my own divided heritage, and these monster writers who were my models. I published only four short stories in the early eighties, then no other fiction until The Long Night of White Chickens in ’92.
AC: It’s been said that The Long Night of White Chickens is as much a Central American novel as it is a U.S. one.
FG: Well, how you live your life changes you. You become the choices you make. Living in Guatemala, I became the person who wrote that book, which, yes, for all its American stuff is very Guatemalan. In Mexico and Guatemala, many critics see it as a Central American book. In La Jornada Semanal, for example, which is a prominent Mexican bookpage, one reviewer placed me in the tradition of Asturias and Cardoza y Aragon, and another guy in the same paper said my influences were Bellow, De Lillo, and Paul Auster.
AC: So are you saying, in a way, that your life has made you more Latino as you go along?
FG: Well, after the 10 years in Guatemala, now I’ve spent half the Nineties living in Mexico City, and there’s also the effect of the time I’ve spent in New York. New York has changed so much. To a certain degree, I think facial features are destiny. In the early Seventies in New York, all the Latins were Puerto Rican. Since I have more Indo-American-type features, back then I wasn’t ordinarily recognized on the streets as a Latino. Then in the Eighties, when the Central Americans began to flood in, everything changed. Now everywhere I go people speak Spanish to me. I’m recognized immediately as a Latino. I get the ugly racist stuff too, the “Hey, Rican” bullshit, so of course more and more I have the sense that these are my people.
Sometimes I think I have the kind of face, that wherever I go I’m the one they hate. When I was living in Spain, where they hate Moroccans, they decided I was Moroccan. I started feeling like that guy who wrote Black Like Me. It was like living in Alabama in the Fifties. Even last year, when I was back in Madrid with my Mexican girlfriend, I was carrying her luggage and she was a couple of steps ahead of me, and a cop came up and warned her that a moro was following her.
AC: I guess I would say the Latino aspects of your background are more prominent in your work than the Jewish ones. While the introspective self-analytical humorous habits of thought are there, I don’t really get much in the way of Jewish ethos.
FG: Though I haven’t lived my life in that environment, I’ve always been really proud of that part of my heritage. Basically, you know, I could have made life easier for myself by taking my mother’s last name. The anti-Semitism in an ignorant country like Guatemala is just unbelievable. I remember one incident down there where I was going with my uncle to this real estate appraisal, some warehouse he was looking at. All of a sudden, the appraiser started spouting off some weird anti-Semitic rap and I went nuts. I leapt across the seat and started strangling him! Racism is my deepest trigger.
I’d have to disagree about the Jewish ethos. I used to think about this a lot. There were a lot of American Jews in Central America, doing human rights, journalism, some very courageous stuff. Jennifer Harbury, I’ve been told, is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. I was no big hero, but I was pretty involved, I did some things down there that I easily could have been killed for. This sense of injustice and something even deeper than that — this is a Jewish ethos. The Guatemalan Army was a Nazi army, it provoked that kind of horror and revulsion, those kind of echoes, definitely.
Actually, I’m planning to have a major Jewish character in my next book, and I’m thinking of taking some classes from a rabbi in preparation.
AC: So how do the critics see you? Are you written about specifically as a Latino?
FG: Because I publish in the States, because of what I write, and because of how I look, I’m usually considered a Latino writer — or sometimes, a hybrid. Junot (Diaz) says it doesn’t matter, I’m a Latino writer, like it or not. That’s how I get treated. There is a separatism in the literary world of publishing in New York, a belief that the important, serious American writing is being done by white writers, and the writing done by Latino writers is some kind of ethnic sideshow. You look in Time magazine, you see four white boys with their eyeglasses, and these are supposed to be the major writers of our generation. Well, some of them are terrific, I’m sure. So are some of us and we’re American too, but we’re always classified separately, in terms of our ethnicity.
I was just out visiting a prominent MFA program and in the whole place there was one Latino kid. I was talking to him after my reading and he told me, “Oh yeah, this is a great place to come if you want to study white writers. Around here, even Toni Morrison is affirmative action.”
AC: While magical realism is associated with Latino writing, it isn’t an element in your work. How do you feel about magical realism?
FG: I think to an extent it’s a schtick, a gimmick now, and it has been overused. The situation we have now, the impact of Garcia Marquez — it’s comparable to the effect of Hemingway on world literature. Hemingway reinvented storytelling, he reinvented dialogue and in the process, he spawned legions of imitators. Those imitators were bestselling writers like Michener and Wouk, who made Hemingway-type writing a commercial genre.
That’s what’s happened with magical realism. People have taken the easiest part of what Garcia Marquez has done and copied it. It should be seen for what it is — it’s not original. I mean, in Latin America, writers like Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, and Angela Mastreta are seen as bestseller writers. Everyone knows they wildly rip off the obvious parts of magical realism. But here they are treated more seriously because people have a simplistic, stereotypical idea of what Latin American writing is.
You know, Garcia Marquez and the boom writers were actually reacting against “folkloric writing” — provincial novels of local color, filled with common tales and superstitions that everybody knew. The boom writers felt that a novel had to do something more original and more challenging than that. But now we’re seeing in current ethnic fiction exactly what the boom writers rejected: folkloric stuff. It puzzles me. On one hand, I think, “How corny,” reacting like good student of the boom, but on the other hand, I wonder if it’s more forgivable because as an immigrant you’re recapturing roots. It’s not for me as a writer, but I can understand it.
In 1983, I interviewed Sergio Ramirez, the Sandinista vice-president of Nicaragua and a terrific novelist, and he told me that when Garcia Marquez burst on the scene, he really fucked up all younger Latin American writers. Everybody read him and said, `Yeah. This is it. This our true voice.’ And so then everybody wanted to write that way. But of course the challenge for a really serious writer to 
find your own original way.
For me, magic realism is a tension, an undertow. For example, the cat in Ordinary Seaman is a kind of wink at magical realism. He actually isn’t so magical. All he does is learn to sit. And only Bernardo believes that he’s come back as a ghost, which is completely realistic, since everyone in Latin America believes in ghosts. Everyone.
AC: Though you’re not a magical realist, I’ve heard you say that Garcia Marquez is your main influence.
FG: Oh yes. He’s the man. The greatest writer alive. But I think the lessons of his work are the depth, the fatalism, the comedy, the narrative innovations, the stuff that’s so much harder to do than the schtick. It was amazing when I moved to Mexico and he went from being an abstract god to a living human being. He was close. I knew people who knew him, even became friends with his son. At my presentacion de libro, which is when a book comes out in Mexico and a group of writers meet with the press and the public and talk about your book while you sit there and grin — well, in my case, the presentation was done by Alvaro Mutis, who is not well known here but is huge internationally and just won the biggest literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world. He has been Garcia Marquez’s best friend since adolescence. He’s always the first person to read Garcia Marquez’s work. They’re such good friends, that if he doesn’t like what he’s read, he sends a messenger over to Garcia Marquez’s house with a waste paper basket.
Mutis, Garcia Marquez, and Botera — that painter who does the fat people, you know? — these three Columbian rakes just tore up Mexico City. They were crazy. Mutis does the voice of Eliot Ness on the Mexican version of The Untouchables. He spent two years in prison, during which Bu�uel used to bring him fresh bread every morning.
You know, when Garcia Marquez went in to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, he was completely broke, he had two kids, and he told his wife, Don’t tell me about money, don’t tell me about bills, just let me write this book, and if this book doesn’t work, I’ll shoot myself. So she had to run up credit everywhere, had to go begging at the butcher, while for a year and half he wrote it.
Every evening, he would get together with Mutis for a drink after his day of writing. Mutis tells how he would come out of his room, exhausted like a boxer, and they would sit down and have a scotch and talk about how the writing had gone that day. Garcia Marquez would tell him about this character and that character and that problem he was having with the plot, and of course Mutis got obsessed with it too, and would think about it all the time himself, what Garcia Marquez should do, how this or that sub-plot should be resolved.
At the end of the year and a half, he gave Mutis the book to read, and it was a whole different book. The novel they had been talking about was a complete fantasy. I love that story. It’s so perverse, so funny — so Latin American. A year-and-a-half long practical joke!
Mutis really encouraged me to write The Ordinary Seaman. He is famous for these Conradian-Borghesian novels of the sea, with a character named Maqroll. When I told him I wanted to write a novel set aboard a ship but I was worried that I didn’t know enough about the sea, he said, “Hey, I don’t know anything about ships myself. Just write the book.”
AC: You share a publisher with our local hero, Dagoberto Gilb. He’s no magical realist, either.
FG: Dago is a perfect example of what I mean about the silly separatism in the literary world. He is a great American short story writer, one of the very greatest, and not in some Latino subcategory. He is completely original, not imitation anybody. What he’s said about magical realism is this: “What’s all this stuff with curanderas in fiction? The closest thing to a curandera in El Paso is a notary public.”
AC: So what is the important trend now?
FG: Intermingling. That’s a really interesting thing that’s going on, with the challenges it presents, the questions it raises about identity, ethnicity, in a truly multicultural society. The extreme tribalism is a cottage industry, an artificial distinction. As time goes on, I’ve seen that I’m not the only one with a mixed background. There was an article the other day in the New York Times about American Indian writers, and two of them were half-Jewish. I had dinner with Esmeralda Santiago, who’s married to a Jew, and she was talking about raising her kids Latino and Jewish. So many of the well-known black and Latino writers have, or have had, white spouses: Julia Alvarez, Skip Gates, Isabella Allende, Cristina Garcia, Hijuelos. Well, I’m their son.
This article appears in June 6 • 1997 and June 6 • 1997 (Cover).