Ascent to Glory. Álvaro Santana-Acuña

the masses the way García Márquez wanted was impossible at the time in Colombia. When he started working as a journalist in 1948, the government had suppressed civil rights, turned to authoritarian rule, and in the end fell into a military dictatorship that lasted five years. Among its anti-democratic actions, the government imposed censorship to control printed media nationwide. Government decrees in 1949 created the Office of Prior Censorship, which authorized censors to scrutinize the contents of any periodical before publication. Not coincidentally, García Márquez’s first known piece of journalism was about the military curfew in Cartagena. At this moment, different “teachers” trained him on how to deal with censorship. At El Universal, his supervisor was managing editor Clemente Manuel Zabala. “A reporter,” García Márquez recalled, “finds a good editor and can move forward professionally.” At first, Zabala edited García Márquez’s writing every day and taught him, pen in hand, what could be written and how to write it. Next, he witnessed a government censor’s actions in the newspaper’s headquarters every day after 6 p.m. The censor read the next day’s edition before it went into print. Thus, the budding writer also saw how the censor (a special kind of gatekeeper, as shown in the previous chapter) edited his writing by removing what could upset the government. Finally, the text was sent to the newspaper’s proofreaders, where García Márquez learned additional editing skills. This extra learning opportunity happened in a casual and unintended way; the journalist often hung out at bars with proofreaders and linotypists after closing hours, since he stayed up until late at night to work on his short stories and novellas.¹⁰

      During the years García Márquez lived in Cartagena and Barranquilla, he wrote nearly four hundred pieces of journalism. Most of them required censors’ approval. As he soon realized, censorship “was a creative challenge,” as he put it. Among his creative solutions was to write with an “objective” narrative style that would give censors the impression of mere fact reporting. This daily routine of dealing with censorship taught him useful skills: how to see his own writing as an outsider and how to use the outsider’s view to edit his work before submitting it for review. Years later, in the newspaper El Espectador of Bogotá, he had a reputation among his peers for delivering very polished originals after obsessive rewriting and copyediting. He also started to transfer these skills to his literary writing, especially to anticipate and overcome criticism from gatekeepers in publishing and educated readers of his work. As he said about his writing ethic after publishing his first book, “It is necessary to write a lot, delete, edit, tear apart many sheets, so that one can finally bring to the editor a few pages.”¹¹

      García Márquez also faced censors as a fiction writer. Before publishing his third novella, In Evil Hour, he had to convince the priest Félix Restrepo, President of the Colombian Academy, that the novel’s text was decent. The priest was not really acting as a political censor but more as a moral one. He wanted García Márquez to remove obscene words—among them masturbation and contraceptive—from the text. But the writer fought back; he knew how to handle the censor. As he explained to a friend, he sent to the priest “the most Jesuit-like letter I could conceive” to tell him that he would change nothing. In this letter, he wrote one of the things the priest wanted to hear: I am “a good Christian.” And he went on to explain to the priest that he wrote his “social” novella with the goal of describing “a disturbing social reality that I have known firsthand in some villages of Colombia.” In other words, he told the priest that he was not inventing anything, but simply reporting facts; precisely, what he learned to do as a journalist in order to bypass government censors. García Márquez convinced the priest, who authorized the publication of his book. Five years later, he used the same narrative style in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel, in the words of censors in Spain, has no “thesis.” Rather “it just describes situations,” as it were a piece of reporting journalism. Mastering these writing skills helped him secure censors’ approval in Spain and also in Argentina, where One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published.¹²

      Along with censors, several of his friends in journalism, who were also writers, collaborated in García Márquez’s education. At El Universal he befriended Héctor Rojas Herazo and Gustavo Ibarra Merlano. The first wrote rural stories influenced by realism, regionalism, and Faulkner. The second was a poet inspired by ancient Greek literature and especially by Sophocles. Along with siblings Ramiro and Óscar de la Espriella, the three men met at bars and coffee shops, where they talked about women, politics, journalism, and literature. Thanks to this group of friends in Cartagena, García Márquez first encountered the works of Sophocles, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Gómez de la Serna, Faulkner, and Woolf, among others. As mentioned earlier, the last two were the subject of several of his newspaper pieces at the time. By then, journalism and literary writing started to become inseparable for García Márquez. Although the city of Cartagena was not as culturally dynamic as Bogotá, it was an important regional hub. Zabala, Rojas Herazo, and García Márquez attended a talk by leading Spanish poet and Góngora scholar Dámaso Alonso; García Márquez shared with him some of his writing. He also praised the works of his friends from his daily column. He wrote a review of the book of poems by Rojas Herazo, El rostro de la soledad (The Face of Solitude). In his opinion, “La casa entre los robles” (“The House among Oak Trees”) was the most beautiful poem in the book. These and other reviews reveal that early on themes such as solitude and the family house were becoming an integral part of García Márquez’s literary imagination.¹³

      In 1950, the journalist left for the nearby city of Barranquilla in search of a better salary. He worked for the newspaper El Heraldo, which paid him one peso daily. He also joined the so-called Barranquilla Group. Its members were mainly amateur writers and visual artists, who met regularly between 1944 and the late 1950s. They were followers of mainstream North American and European modernist fiction; several of them had already read García Márquez’s short stories in El Espectador. The fact that he used literary techniques imported from modernism facilitated his admission to this group.

      As the Cartagena Group did, the Barranquilla Group supervised García Márquez’s literary writing. It oriented his professional readings toward cosmopolitan works of ancient Roman and Greek literature and modernist Western literature. The group helped him financially and lent him books that the impoverished journalist could not afford to buy. It was “a time of . . . discovery,” García Márquez explained. “Not of literature! But of literature applied to real life which, after all, is the big problem of literature.” Unlike what happened to the shy and awkwardly dressed writer in Bogotá, he did not feel outclassed or a cultural outsider in Barranquilla. As a member put it, he “was the [most] provincial of the group” and they did not share his lower middle-class background or rural origins.¹⁴ But culturally, García Márquez was a costeño just like most members of the group. Indeed, Barranquilla is less than 150 kilometers away from García Márquez’s birthplace. Thus, his closest group of friends (who even became characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude) shared his culture and bohemian lifestyle. Regular participants during García Márquez’s stay in this city included writers Alfonso Fuenmayor, Germán Vargas, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, painters Alejandro Obregón and Noé León, and photographer Enrique Scopell. Writer and Spanish exile Ramón Vinyes—the character of the wise Catalan in the novel—often led their conversations on journalism, literature, arts, and politics.¹⁵

      Their conversations were not just about local arts but also cosmopolitan debates about the literary mainstream. Germán Vargas advised the owner of El Mundo bookstore, one of the group’s meeting points, on book selections for its customers. To do this, Vargas read magazines and newspaper supplements such as El Hijo Pródigo from Mexico City and Sur and La Nación from Buenos Aires at the bookstore. Thanks to this up-to-date bookstore, the group received a regular flow of international and regional literary journals and works by Latin American writers such as Cortázar, Borges, Neruda, and Felisberto Hernández as well as foreign writers such as Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, William Saroyan, Erskine Caldwell, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos. Group members also exchanged books they had read. And as copies passed from one member to another, readers could see the handwritten