I will always miss talking to my friend Jorge Edwards. He spoke as he wrote, he wrote as he spoke, with marvelous parsimony. In 2012, we spoke at the International Fair in Guadalajara purple circles, the first volume of his memoirs. Jorge considered it a “biographical novel without fiction”. It was his favorite genre: a literary bridge between biography and novel. I read it in one sitting, with a permanent smile: a smile of satisfaction for a pleasant, educated, informed and gentle reading; a melancholic smile in the most difficult and painful moments he narrates. I read it as if Jorge had spoken deliciously to me one afternoon, drinking whiskey, with restrained passion and without overflowing. And that is that one of the great virtues of that book (beyond its interest in Chilean literary and political history of the post-war period) was in the tone of its prose, clear, unadorned prose, prose close to confidentiality. That prose was the aesthetic and moral breath of Jorge Edwards.

Speaking publicly about that quality I made no discovery. “You write with unusual calm,” Pablo Neruda, his literary father, once told him. In the last paragraph Persona non grata This exchange appears with Fidel Castro, the authoritarian caudillo he exposed for the first time in that seminal work of ideological dissent in our countries:

Do you know what impressed me the most in this conversation?

What, prime minister?

– Your peace!

In his review of Persona non grata (1973), Mario Vargas Llosa – his historical friend – praised “the urbanity of his prose, a notebook with refreshing honesty, the unlimited freedom with which he thinks, completely unusual (in our political writings)”. Jorge, of course, was aware of this virtue: “…write slowly, without suffocation, with properly controlled texts, gradually developed, carefully fluffed and seasoned.”

eternal montalbano

A Chilean Montaigne? Optional friendships. Montaigne found his fictional biographer in Edwards. And I can think of no better teacher for turning the pages of life than a skeptical essayist, a man of balance in a time of religious wars. But interestingly, unlike his predecessor, Jorge didn’t give subtle lessons or make big guesses. Edwards told.

What was the root of that way of life? Jorge overcame many currents: social prejudice against his surname and his aristocratic family; the anti-literary prejudices of his father, a strict and hardworking man who expected everything from him except to become a writer; the religious prejudices of his Jesuit teachers (including the mistreatment of pedophilia, which he narrates with exceptional honesty and courage) and the ideological prejudices of the leftist church at the time, with which, despite his closeness to Neruda, he never felt a lower affinity. This multiple oppression predisposed him to freedom:

I acquired a permanent, rooted awareness of my difference, of my uniqueness and an increasing fascination with disorder, an irresistible desire to get out of the order that was imposed on me from all sides and from which I unintentionally turned (or to some extent, wanting to) in the symbol , in the paradigm.

From this calm confession, it is not difficult to imagine the background of his Cuban experience. Edwards reacted against Castro’s Jesuit order.

No one knew that uncomfortable terrain outside of churches like Edwards. When originally published, Persona non grata He did not find a publisher in Europe for his criticism of Castro. It was legal to talk about repression only in Chile, not in Cuba. In the prologue to the new edition of his book, he described this Manichean atmosphere: “One-sided indignation was practiced with great fanfare: a moral hemiplegic, paralyzed on the left side.” Edwards said he had learned that literature, literary journalism, publishing, teaching, coffeehouses on the left bank of the Seine and in the capitals of Latin America were nests of censors, professional informers. “Slaves of slogans”, as Vicente Huidobro said. On the other hand, the book did not circulate even during the first years of Pinochet because its epilogue offended the Hunt. When Edwards spoke firsthand about Cuba, he was right, but when he revealed the horror stories in Chile, he was committing “an act against the country.” Only a limited edition was approved in 1978.

Edwards, before all of us, suffered from the loneliness of a critical writer of right-wing dictatorships, but stigmatized by the left-wing clergy for pointing out their unpleasant facts. He was, in this sense, the American brother of Koestler and Orwell. He had a gift of clarity, rare in a world like Latin America, baroque, ordinary and confused. His tone, indistinguishable from his person, fits into one single word that may one day describe this continent of unquenchable hatred: the word civility. (OR)