For family reasons, we bought a flat in Paris, near the entrance to the most famous cemetery in the world, Père Lachaise. I have always loved cemeteries and find them almost as irresistible as bookshops.
I took many walks in Père Lachaise, and one day the not very startling idea came to my mind, that if there were many famous writers—Balzac, Proust, Oscar Wilde—buried there, it was likely that there were also writers, many more of them in fact, buried there who had been completely forgotten, not necessarily because they were not good but because cultural memory is necessarily limited.
And so it proved. In an afternoon, without much difficulty, I assembled the names of at least twenty writers. I checked that they were unknown to the educated and literate French and British people of my acquaintance, and even when their names rang a faint bell, which was rarely, my acquaintances’ knowledge of them never went further.
I chose eight such authors more or less at random. By the miracle of modern technology, I was able, through my telephone, to learn a little of their biographies (with the exception of one, so obscure that she had left no trace on the internet) and order their books from secondhand dealers even before I had even left the cemetery. Before the advent of such technology, a book such as the one I have just written would have taken many years to write, and I, certainly, would not have written it.
My aim has been to entertain while illustrating the inexhaustible depth of our past.
Few lives are more extraordinary than that (I almost said those) of Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927). He must have been born under some special star that marked him out from others, for at the age of eighteen he left his native Guatemala to pursue, with almost immediate success, a career in Paris as a writer, intellectual, and bohemian. In his day he was famous, or at least celebrated and partly notorious, but practically nothing is now written about him without drawing attention to the oblivion into which he has fallen, even in his native Guatemala. It is true that in the 1960s there was a brief attempt, for nationalist reasons, to have his remains returned to Guatemala, and a monument was erected to him, but his body was not returned, and the nearest to return that was achieved was the spread of some earth from Père Lachaise at the site of the monument. Guatemalan intellectuals were divided on the question of whether his remains should return to Guatemala: the argument for return being that he was Guatemalan, and the argument against being that he lived all his adult life in France and that is where his heart was.
No ordinary person could have made his way so quickly at so early an age and from so provincial a backwater as Guatemala into the heart of bohemian Paris. He became immediately acquainted with Verlaine, the great poet, and later with Oscar Wilde. It is said that he even gave money to Verlaine from the Guatemalan scholarship that he was supposed to use to study in Madrid, a city that he soon abandoned for Paris. Interestingly, though, and perhaps surprisingly, he wrote all his many books in Spanish, not in French.
Mystery and mythology surround his biography. Even the exact number of his books is not known, at least according to a 1956 biographer:
As the astronomers tell us that there are stars whose light has not reached us, so there are works of Gómez Carrillo that remain in the zone of conjecture, that people assert have been published, and that they have read and possess, and yet that have not been listed in any of the bibliographies up to the present day.
Fifty-five years later, in 2011, we read in the introduction to a reprint of his three volumes of autobiography, Treinta Años de mi Vida (Thirty Years of My Life), and eighty-four years after his death:
How many books did Gómez Carrillo publish? Nobody knows for certain. He shuffled his pages, gave different titles to similar contents, and at any time could deliver to any generous publisher a supposedly unpublished work although it had been published only a few days before by another.
One of the strange, almost bizarre, things about his career is the persistent rumor that he was Mata Hari’s last lover and that it was he who betrayed her to the French as a spy, thereby becoming partly responsible for her death by firing squad. He took advantage of the rumor to write a popular book about her, Le mystère de la vie et de la mort de Mata Hari (The Mystery of the Life and Death of Mata Hari). In this book, however, he denied that he had ever met, or even seen, Mata Hari. He recounts a conversation in Madrid with the disgraced and exiled French minister of the interior Louis Malvy, who had been cast out from France in 1918 for five years because of alleged negligence in the performance of his ministerial duties, and who was also suspected of treason, his pacifist newspaper, Bonnet Rouge, having received funds from the Germans.
Gómez Carrillo asked Malvy what Mata Hari’s true role had been during the war, on the assumption that, as minister of the interior at the time, Malvy must have had inside knowledge. The following conversation ensued:
“But of the two of us who must know who were the friends of the famous dancer, it is you.”
“Me . . . why?”
There was a moment’s silence, during which the former minister’s fine face became worried. In the end, visibly disturbed, he wanted to apologize for his indiscretion, and asked me to talk of less macabre subjects. But I had a great curiosity to know the reason for his enigmatic phrases; and so, serious in my turn, I asked him to explain what they meant.
“It’s no secret from anyone,” he replied, “and I don’t mean only your love affair with Mata Hari.”
“My love affair with Mata Hari?”
“Yes, everyone is whispering that you were her last lover . . .”
“Me? That’s very flattering, after all, because she was so famous a woman,” I exclaimed, laughing. “Only, there’s nothing to it.”
Malvy went on to say to Gómez Carrillo, “delicately,” that the rumors claimed that he was not only the secret lover, but the denouncer of Mata Hari. The author denied these charges, using two arguments: first that he was so notoriously a Don Juan that he never hid his affairs, and second that, having written two books on the subject of exotic dance, he had never so much as mentioned Mata Hari. And Malvy went on to say that the rumor spread by Spanish Germanophiles that Gómez Carrillo had been decorated as a commander of the Légion d’honneur for his services as the denouncer were absurd, because the republic rewarded the exceptional services of policemen with money, not honors:
“The more grotesque a calumny,” murmured [Malvy], “the more it finds people disposed to believe it.”
Gómez Carrillo provides another argument as to why he could not possibly be Mata Hari’s betrayer. “I remember,” he writes, “the first time my name spread beyond the purlieus of the literary world and reached the ears of the general public [in Madrid]. . . . I had been elected corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy at the age of twenty-one. The title so flattered my youthful vanity that I put it on my visiting card.” But when he learned that one of the members of the Royal Academy, called Cotarelo, had, in order to claim a reward, revealed to the police the whereabouts in Madrid of the notorious French swindler Madame Humbert, who had fled to Spain on exposure of her swindle, he told the permanent secretary of the academy that unless it expelled Cotarelo he would resign. This raised a public controversy, for and against denunciation of wrongdoers.
Gómez Carrillo wrote, partly as proof of his innocence with regard to his alleged denunciation of Mata Hari, that:
I who have always felt the most profound horror for all amateur detectivism, all dilettante Sherlock-Holmsianism, believe therefore that I behaved nobly.
This seems to capture quite well the self-congratulatory inclinations of many intellectuals when they pronounce simplistically on morally complex issues, making generous-sounding rhetoric stand for real thought.
No one finds informers—those who denounce minor wrongdoers (or even the innocent) to the authorities out of spite, sadism, revenge, or desire for petty reward—attractive. But that, surely, is not the end of the matter: at some point, failure to inform becomes complicity, sometimes with a great crime. In the prison in which I worked as a doctor, no prisoner was more despised, or in danger of attack, than a known informer, called a grass, but there was nevertheless an implicit limit to prisoners’ fear of or unwillingness to inform on each other. Once, for example, a prisoner secretly murdered his cellmate, who was found dead, apparently by hanging. I was on duty that night, and two prisoners gave me clues that resulted in the apprehension and conviction of the murderer. The informers were more subtle in their moral thinking than Gómez Carrillo: yes, informing was unpleasant and sometimes truly disgusting, but no, there could be no blanket prohibition of it.
Of course, it could be argued that Madame Humbert was a swindler, not a murderess. Indeed, her swindles were so outrageous that they exposed the foolishness, greed, and gullibility of the grandest of grand people in the French Third Republic: the kind of spectacle that we earthlings, prone to Schadenfreude, always enjoy and the opportunity for experiencing which, more recently, persons such as Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried have provided us—except that Madame Humbert was a far more interesting character, having started out as the illegitimate daughter of two illegitimate parents in rural France. Moreover, having been once exposed, it would have been impossible for Madame Humbert to have resumed the swindles that allowed her and her whole family to live in the greatest of luxury for twenty years. She was ruined for good, and therefore no further punishment would have served any useful purpose.
Against these arguments that must have sustained Gómez Carrillo in his self-satisfaction might be argued two things. First that though Madame Humbert’s swindles amusingly exposed the folly and credulity of the elite, they also ruined thousands of small savers who lost everything in the eventual crash. There were quite a number of suicides as a result of her defalcations, and much suffering beside. Hers was not merely an amusing morality tale, a kind of practical satire on the rich and well-educated; she deprived thousands of people of the fruit of years of hard work and sacrifice.
Second, while it is true that she would never have been able to return to her dishonest activities, and that any harm she was able to do had already been done and would not have been undone by punishment, not to have punished her would also have had its consequences, by implying that everyone can rightfully escape punishment provided that the harm done by his acts cannot be undone by punishment and that he will be incapable of repeating those acts.
Punitiveness, of course, is another unpleasant characteristic, along with tendency to inform. To punish is cruel, not to punish is generous. And yet this too is simplistic and, in the end, less generous than it at first seems. Let us suppose that the case here were not of swindling, but of murder. Let us suppose also that the victim was the one man whom the murderer ever wanted to kill, and he was therefore unlikely ever to kill again. Would we say, “Well, that’s all right then,” and leave it at that? Would this not give license to everyone to kill one person, provided only that it was the person whom he hated above all others?
Furthermore, the harm done by the crimes of someone like Madame Humbert is not over the moment she is exposed. If one has lost one’s life savings, one does not have another life in which to recuperate them, and, even if one did, it would impose onerous work on those who had previously saved precisely to be free of it.
And there is yet another consideration. As I know from clinical experience, those who have been victims of serious crimes in which the perpetrator has been dealt with leniently often suffer severely from this very leniency. The leniency implies that what they have suffered as victims is of no great importance to the state by comparison with the feelings of the criminals and, more particularly, of the intellectual class—which is in favor of such leniency for fear of appearing punitive in the eyes of each other.
As we shall see, Gómez Carrillo had a considerable capacity for hypocrisy, but let us return to the rumor that he was the betrayer of Mata Hari. Where did this rumor originate? Given that he was a famous lothario and Mata Hari was generous with her favors, it is not inherently impossible that he was her lover.
Trying to find how a rumor originates is often like trying to find the precise margin of a mist. Some authors give the rumors no credit: two lengthy recent biographies of Mata Hari do not mention them, nor does a novelized account of her life by the popular author Paulo Coelho (and their sensational nature might have been expected to attract the attention of a novelist). In constrast, Paul Webster, in his biography of Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, the widow of Gómez Carrillo, implies that the award of the Légion d’honneur to the author just after the end of the war is some kind of evidence in the rumors’ plausibility.
One explanation of the rumors is that they were the work of Guatemalan authors and others envious of his success. There is another reason why he might have been hated, however, as we shall see. “The rumor began with certain mediocre writers envious of his prestige,” said the poet Miguel Marsicovétere y Durán. Mentioned in this connection is a jealous former wife of Gómez Carrillo’s, Raquel Meller, also a dancer, though a less successful one than Mata Hari. Admiral Canaris, the head of the German Abwehr, apparently claims in his memoirs that it was Gómez Carrillo who betrayed Mata Hari.
Another theory is that Gómez Carrillo, like Mata Hari herself, was a fantasist and liar who was always avid for publicity, and started the rumors himself, of which he then took advantage to write a book. César González-Ruano wrote, “Those of us who knew Carrillo knew that he was a man capable of inventing a story that he pretended hurt him and against which he protested, because his time in bohemian Paris and his desire épater les bourgeois, as well as his literary and personal position as an enfant terrible,” meant that he no longer knew, or wanted to know, where reality ended and fantasy began.
Now to the reason why Guatemalan writers might have hated as well as envied Gómez Carrillo. The curious fact is that this man who demanded the most absolute liberty for himself, and indeed lived largely as if it had been granted him, was a paid praise-singer of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, one of the most thoroughgoing despots of Guatemala’s history, a history that is not short of despots. In the year in which Estrada Cabrera came to power (semi-constitutionally, before he revealed his vocation as tyrant), 1898, Gómez Carrillo wrote a pamphlet so sycophantic that only fear or favor could explain it: and since he was beyond Estrada Cabrera’s reach, money is the explanation. The pamphlet begins wittily:
A few weeks ago, one of our most illustrious writers asserted that visitors to Guatemala would leave without knowing anything about Estrada Cabrera because of the great amount that has been written about him.
This draws attention to the distinction between information and knowledge in a wider sense, a distinction all the more important in the age of social media. But the tone of the pamphlet soon changes into that of flattery that is redolent almost of high Stalinism:
During the days of solemn silence, when the cheap press left off its vociferating . . . the silhouette of the successful liberal candidate stood out clearly. The people could see him, then, in the grave serenity of his office, always serene, always energetic, always concerned for the well-being of the country.
And so on and so forth.
This pamphlet earned Gómez Carrillo the Guatemalan consulship in Paris and a generous salary.
It is not uncommon, of course, for a newly elected head of government to arouse the enthusiasm of his supporters, but the enthusiasm is usually followed more or less quickly by disillusionment. In the case of Estrada Cabrera, however, the enthusiasm never abated, despite the irrefutable evidence of his increasing tyranny. Gómez Carrillo’s dithyrambs continued, and the Guatemalan novelist and essayist Carlos Wyld Ospina, in his book El Autócrata (The Autocrat), published in 1929, two years after Gómez Carrillo’s death, says that it was the practice of the dictator to suborn writers, of whom Gómez Carrillo was one, so that they spread propaganda about the magnificent achievements of his regime. In 1913, Gómez Carrillo wrote to the dictator as follows:
My very respected friend: . . .
Thanks to you, only you, my young compatriots are going to read me. I have not waited to savor in this life this honor that in general is reserved for the dead. But because it is so unexpected, the pleasure you have given me fills me with pride. In the face of the admirable work of popular education that you have done for many years, I have many times thought of the intimate satisfaction that one must experience to see that, thanks to one’s efforts, new generations are being raised carrying in them the germ of culture that one day not very far off our country will be highly placed among the most civilized countries of the world.
Mutual backscratching could hardly go further.
In October 1915, Gómez Carrillo wrote to the president of the National Convention (the parliamentary façade of the regime) as follows, with regard to the forthcoming “election”:
Permit me to say that although I am not legally entitled to vote in the next presidential elections, I will do so morally. My vote is that of all Guatemalans: a sincere vote for our great Estrada Cabrera, who has saved the country from a thousand dangers and has given it peace, progress, national dignity and love of culture. Personally, it is not the first time that I say Estrada Cabrera is the greatest politician on the Latin American continent. . . . In Europe, I pronounce his name with pride and say, “He is a statesman who would do honor to France or England.”
By this time, Gómez Carrillo had long been in receipt of money from the dictator and could hardly have failed to be aware of the nature of his regime. Carlos Wyld Ospina described its despotic characteristics, to say nothing of its financial corruption:
Estrada Cabrera came to be the only important person in Guatemala.
[His] morbid passion for power and control led him to demand of the country adoration, of his name, his words, of the most trivial manifestations of his personality. He tolerated different qualities [from his own] provided they did not rise above mediocrity, or while they remained in a lower sphere, anonymous and hidden. . . . The quality he most persecuted was independence of character. . . .
The . . . collaborators with the autocracy formed an army of henchmen and traffickers. . . . The informers, spies and official and unofficial hangmen were legion. . . .
Estrada Cabrera required of his servants two indispensable qualities if they wanted to stay in their posts: obedience without question and adoration without let-up.
Finally, all was lies:
The entire administration was a farce. Like a malign acid, the lie corroded and corrupted everything. It lived by the lie, in the lie, and for the lie.
Interestingly, there is another Guatemalan writer, Miguel Ángel Asturias, who is buried in Père Lachaise and who, like Gómez Carrillo, was the diplomatic representative of his country in France. He took an opposite view of Estrada Cabrera from that of Gómez Carrillo, his most famous novel, El Señor Presidente (1946), being a fictionalized description of his effects on life in Guatemala. Asturias won the Nobel Prize in the days when a higher proportion of its recipients had literary merit.
Gómez Carrillo’s obsequiousness from afar towards Estrada Cabrera might have been one of the reasons he was disliked by some of his less successful compatriots, who therefore spread nasty rumors about him.
Gómez Carrillo died quite a rich man. He had a flat in Paris full of precious objects and a magnificent house and garden in the south. He also owned property in Argentina (he became an Argentine citizen and consul of that country in France, suggesting that his loyalties were fluid). Though dissipated for much of his life, he was a ferociously hard worker, writing fluently and with ease, often publishing several books a year. Yet it is difficult to believe that his wealth derived entirely from his writing. For example, my copy of one of his most commercially successful books, the one about Mata Hari, says on its cover that it is in the thirteen thousandth printed, a very respectable sale, but books in those days were cheaply produced and such a sale could hardly have yielded a fortune. Is it possible that the foundation of Gómez Carrillo’s wealth was subvention from the dictator? Even though Guatemala was a poor country, the resources of its dictator were huge by comparison with those of the average, or above-average, writer.
Before leaving the subject of Mata Hari and Gómez Carrillo altogether, it is perhaps appropriate to mention the latter’s love life, which was rich and complex. His biographer, Edelberto Torres, claims that “No Don Juan in any age had so many women in his arms during his life as Gómez Carrillo,” and whatever the precise accuracy of this claim, it is certain that the writer was a great seducer (including, sometimes early in his life, of men). His first and short marriage, to the daughter of a rich Peruvian general, ended when, having driven with him to her hairdresser’s in Paris, she found him when she returned from the salon drinking in a café with their chauffeur. His wife, anxious to preserve social distance from the servants, said that the chauffeur would have to go. “If he goes, I go,” said Gómez Carrillo, and he went.
He was a man of great charm. The famous Nicaraguan modernist poet Rubén Darío said that if one day Enrique decided that he wanted to be a bishop, he was sure that he would succeed in becoming one. His fundamental outlook on life was Wildean, aesthetic rather than moral. He was without scruple in pursuit of what he wanted, and towards the end of his life he said that if he had his time over again, he would want to live as he had lived.
It is said that, in his time in Paris, Gómez Carrillo fought eighteen duels and was the best swordsman in the city. Some expressed surprise that he had neither killed nor been killed (for my part, I am surprised that duels persisted so commonly into the twentieth century). He almost fought a duel with the former lover of his third wife, the Mexican writer José Vasconcelos (whose work is nowadays much more read than is Gómez Carrillo’s), who was advised to desist because of Gómez Carrillo’s skill with the sword.
His third wife, Consuelo Suncin, to whom he was married, as her second husband, only for the last eleven months of his life, was a Salvadorean woman who in some ways resembled Mata Hari, though not physically. Like Mata Hari, she escaped her extremely constricting provincial life to the bright lights of Paris, where she enjoyed the bohemian life. Even in the eleven months of their marriage, Gómez Carrillo (who said that he could offer her only his syphilitic decrepitude) found the time and energy to be unfaithful to her, as she to him. But perhaps the power or attraction of his personality is testified to by the fact that when she died in 1979, fifty-two years after him, she chose to be buried next to him, though she had remarried and was still the widow of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the famous writer and aviator who was lost in an accident in the Mediterranean in 1944. She might have elected to be buried at sea near to where his plane went down but chose instead to be interred next to Gómez Carrillo. This is reminiscent of Caitlin Thomas’s decision to be buried next to her first husband, Dylan Thomas, thirty-seven years after his death, even though she had found a new man and had a son by him. No one, I think, would deny the power of Dylan Thomas’s personality.
“Nothing,” wrote Carlos Wyld Ospina, “helps to conquer literary fame like a reputation for being an ‘immoral writer.’ Gómez Carrillo had it and sucked the juice from it with consummate cleverness, in his art and in his life as a bohemian of the purest dye.” He goes on to say that Gómez Carrillo started as a novelist but was a bad one. He excelled, however, as a chronicler, essayist, and travel writer, mixing frivolity with seriousness and erudition. And, attached as he was to the life of a Parisian flâneur and boulevardier, he was also a great traveler at a time when travel was a good deal more arduous than it is today. His books can still be read with amusement, instruction, and pleasure. He was, in fact, a very good writer, however one assesses his character, since, after all, one judges a writer principally by his writing.
In 1905, for example, in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war, he went to Russia, which, then as now, was not an easy thing to do. The resultant book, La Rusia Actual (The Russia of Today), is an extremely powerful denunciation of the oppressive nature of Tsarism and can now be read as a corrective to the common notion that, because the communist regime was so vastly worse than the tsarist regime, the latter was really not too bad. Gómez Carrillo did not write prophetically of Russia, like Dostoevsky or Conrad, but he was certainly no optimist about its future.
The dedication of the book, to Doctor Geo D. Coen, is interesting in itself, at least for students of Gómez Carrillo:
You remember, dear friend, that afternoon when you advised me severely to renounce my habitual frivolous fantasies and devote myself to social studies? We were sitting on a terrace on a boulevard. It was spring. And while you were talking of serious things, I was ecstatic over the delightful Parisiennes who went rhythmically by. “Never”—murmured the froufrous of the street—“will any problem interest you more than us.”
But Gómez Carrillo underwent a change:
There came a day, however, when the deep, the sad, the unpleasant, the dirty, the poor, seduced me. It was my long day in Russia. There under the snow I forgot the frivolous and devoted myself to the serious. I read documents that before would have made me laugh, and I cried; I copied columns of figures, horrible figures; I translated judicial documents. And when I had finished, I said to myself, “This is the study that my good friend Coen always advised me to make.” I have it here, my friend. It is a heavy book. It is an archive of cruelties. It is the memorial of a time of blood and pain. Your upright and pious soul will feel on reading it what mine, frivolous but good, felt in writing it.
Russia has always been a corrective to lightheartedness.
Gómez Carrillo expresses the same anxiety on crossing into Russia that Custine did in 1839, and which we would probably feel today and people will no doubt feel in a hundred years’ time. The first chapter, “The Tsar Who Trembles,” is devoted to the fear that the autocrat himself suffers, very similar to that experienced by the last autocrat but one, as described by Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé twenty years before:
In this vast empire of terror, the one who is most afraid is the monarch. In this respect, at least, his supremacy is evident. The fear of others, those who see the image of Siberia before them at every step, results in a simple shiver, if compared with the perpetual shaking that torments the imperial being. What can I say! The very Sultan of Turkey, who in his dreams has the most atrocious visions of death, is a heroic figure by comparison with his neighbor. Abdul-Hamid loves, intrigues, desires, orders, hates, lives. Nicholas II . . . hardly breathes. He seeks a distraction, a pleasure, in his long days. In vain. The only thing he does is struggle against the shadows that threaten him. The long hours of meditation, the consultations with dukes and ministers, the prolonged reading, is the response to nothing but fear. Every effort at reform is a product of fear. Fear, fear without end, is what moves and motivates him. Only fear!
This is all very different from the sound of dresses passing on the boulevard.
Gómez Carrillo is good on Nicholas’s character:
Like every weak and fanatical being, Nicholas is superstitious and attached to occult sciences and experiments. In the first years of his reign, his intimate adviser was a Frenchman called Philippe, whose power reached such a pitch that the Grand Dukes and ministers trembled in front of him . . .
Nizier Anthelme Philippe (1849–1905) was a French healer of supposedly extraordinary powers, several times tried for the illegal practice of medicine but eventually having doctorates of medicine conferred upon him. It is easier to be a healer when very few cures exist.
Fear in the tsarist empire was also an opportunity:
This perpetual, horrible fear, is an inexhaustible mine for the Grand Dukes and functionaries, in which are to be found honors and advantages. Far from combatting it, they seek to increase it by diabolical inventions. The police invent conspiracies; the generals imagine revolutionary projects; courtiers see nihilists everywhere. General Trepov, present Governor of Saint Petersburg, is a master of this. His history, as everyone knows, is full of inventions of assassination attempts against Caesar.
Trepov himself was the object of many assassination attempts, though he died of illness. This was a time when it was not always easy to distinguish the secret police from the revolutionaries and vice versa; it is surely rather odd that Gómez Carrillo did not see the parallels between tsarist Russia and Cabrerist Guatemala.
Gómez Carrillo is eloquent on the fate of the Jews. He ends the chapter:
In Russia, there is no forgiveness even for the tombs of the Jews. A telegram from Irkutsk says the Jewish cemeteries in which the bodies of the political exiles are buried, killed in the massacres at Irkutsk, present a sad aspect. Two weeks ago, all the monuments were destroyed and the remains of the bodies strewn about. . . . The cemetery appears to been invaded by barbarians. Invisible hands continue this sacrilege with rancor and hatred.
With a single anecdote, Gómez Carrillo captures the Gogolian aspect of Russian bureaucracy. An English journalist of his acquaintance goes to a government office in St. Petersburg to enquire about the revenue from tobacco. Ten people who are obviously doing nothing suddenly try to appear busy. He begins “Could you . . . ?”
“Not here,” all ten reply immediately without even knowing what he is going to ask.
He persists, however, and continues, “Could you give me some information on the revenue from tobacco?”
“Not here,” the ten reply.
On the door of the office were painted the words, “Statistical information about tobacco.”
This is the very essence of bureaucracy.
Gómez Carrillo has an ability to capture essences. He doesn’t much care for St. Petersburg, which he thinks is grandiose without beauty. He says that it is “an encampment of palaces,” which a Russian friend of mine thought a very apt description. It is a city by decree, of decree, for decree, but I think it beautiful all the same.
In the year in which Gómez Carrillo traveled to Russia, he went also to the other combatant in the war, Japan, and published a book in the same year about his impressions. I don’t know whether he was the first Guatemalan ever to visit Japan, but there surely cannot have been many before him, and the fact that he even thought to do so is a tribute to his imaginative curiosity.
There is little doubt that he preferred Japan to Russia, finding there much to admire (he found nothing in Russia to admire). But his entry into Tokyo from Yokohama was disappointing, for despite the vastness of the city, he saw nothing beautiful there. The streets were muddy and filthy; the citizens disposed in them of whatever they did not want, just as they did in Port-au-Prince the last time I was there. Even in China (according to Gómez Carrillo), despite its poverty, the streets were at least jollier. Contrary to his romantic dreams of Japan, Tokyo was wretched. He describes his journey from Shimbashi station, “vulgar but lively,” to his hotel (one of three European establishments in the city):
Journey without end, made in tall and narrow vehicles pulled by a man who trots like a horse. Oh, the sadness of these vehicles! I feel it more here than in China or in India, no doubt because of the muddiness of the streets and the enormous distances. We went for half an hour through sordid little streets, and we were still far [from our destination]. The journey generally takes an hour, sometimes two. The Japanese [rickshaw pullers] were content to smile, happy to all in appearance, resigned in reality, and continued to trot through the interminable, the incredible, streets of their city. From time to time, they stopped a second to dry the sweat of their brow and then continue their dreary way, more than dreary for those unused to it—anxiety-provoking.
Reading his account of the city, one can only wonder at its transformation in far less than a century: and for those of us (who are many) who are inclined to take the present for granted, as if all that exists now has always existed and always will exist, it is a valuable corrective to that shallow view.
One of the things that strikes him immediately is that the entire population seems to wear spectacles. “The soldiers, the tram-drivers, the policemen, the workers, everyone wears them. They are objects of national necessity.” Gómez Carrillo thinks that this is a matter of fashion, rather than an expression of a genetic predisposition to short-sightedness. (In North Korea, I was struck by precisely the opposite phenomenon, the complete absence of spectacles, as if the wearing of spectacles were an admission of national weakness. Under the reign of Macías Nguema in Equatorial Guinea, the wearing of spectacles was dangerous, for it implied that the person was educated, and the dictator was very sensitive on the subject of those who were more educated than he.)
Gómez Carrillo was an acute observer, but not of the future. He laments something that makes the streets of Tokyo even uglier:
Progress, which has not remembered to construct pavements in the streets, or put lights in the public thoroughfares, has, by contrast, added to the horrors that already existed, thanks to the telegraph and telephone networks. Oh! these infinite wires! You can imagine a spider’s web like this. In the humblest alleyways there are thousands of wires and hundreds of poles to keep them up. The story of a telephone in every home, even in those of beggars, is not a legend. There, where there is neither a bed nor clothes, is a telephone. At the corner of every street you see kiosks which say Public Telephone. And it is thereby that Europeanism is reduced to some melon hats and numerous telephones.
Despite the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese war, in which they used the most modern weaponry of the time and sank almost the entire Russian Baltic fleet, Gómez Carrillo did not see this mass adoption of what was then new technology as a harbinger of the speed with which Japan caught up, and in many respects surpassed, European nations: he saw it only as a manifestation of the crudeness and ugliness that westernization brought with it. Indeed, when one looks at the views of Edo (as Tokyo was then called), and the landscapes, of Hokusai and Hiroshige, one cannot but sympathize with the viewpoint of Gómez Carrillo, who was an aesthete above all. How far ugliness existed in those two artists’ time, I do not know; what is certain is that Japan’s civilization was of the highest aesthetic sophistication and refinement.
It is easy to romanticize previous ages as being more beautiful than our own, and no doubt (after a certain age) we are all prone to do so. But Gómez Carrillo has done his homework, and while he accepts that before the advent of modernization—with the industrialization that brought with it both great wealth and horrible poverty—Japan had a materially egalitarian society, he quotes accounts of the famines that affected the country that are as graphic as can well be imagined: human suffering is not of recent invention. He quotes the eighteenth-century poet Bakin’s account of the famine of 1786:
A witness worthy of credence assured me that of five hundred families in a village, only thirty remain: all the members of the others were dead. Eighty sens [cents of a yen] were given for a dog and more than fifty for a rat. The dead were eaten . . .
A man who had already lost his wife and older son was ready to sacrifice his other son. He went to his neighbor and said:
As [my son] is going to die also, it would be better to kill him and eat him. As his father, I don’t have the courage to kill him; if you do, we’ll share him.
The neighbor accepted, “but hardly had he killed the child than the father beheaded him with an axe, not out of revenge, but to have the body all to himself.”
Japan before industrialization, then, was not always an aesthete’s paradise.
Gómez Carrillo gives an interesting account of Japanese nationalism and sense of superiority, at the same time as its chivalrous conduct towards the defeated Russians (as a man of contradictions himself, he could spot the existence of contrary tendencies in the world). For example, the Japanese preserved the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Tokyo from attack and allowed it to continue to function throughout the war, all the more surprisingly because the cathedral itself was of a scale (and ugliness) designed to dominate the city, whose buildings were still of modest proportions. It also came as something of a surprise to me to learn that there were Japanese converts to Russian Orthodoxy.
But the Japanese, at least the upper class, were so impressed by their own military victories over China and Russia that they fell victim to the illusion of many successful nations, that they were special, unique, providential, destined to be the center of the world. Gómez Carrillo writes:
In his heroism, in his love of justice, in his cult of loyalty and generosity, the samurai is sustained by pride in being Japanese. You others, you who believe you love and admire your countries; you others, men of Europe and America, you hardly deserve to be called patriots! The citizen of Japan deifies his country—Listen: “The civilizations of all countries must unite in Japan; and Japan will transform all these civilizations by its own influence, and give to the world a new and veritable civilization. Such is Japan’s special mission, that which will eternalize its influence.”
The civilizations of India and China reached Japan and could expand no further; the civilizations of Europe went to America, which brought them to Japan, and could go no further. Therefore, Japan was destined to be the center of the world.
Success in war gave the Japanese a sense of invincibility (which before long proved dangerous even to themselves, let alone to their neighbors). The Russians, they said, fought from a sense of duty, the Japanese from a desire for glory and indifference to their own individual lives, and the latter were therefore bound to prevail. Their sense of anger and disillusionment at the provisions of the Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by President Theodore Roosevelt, which were relatively favorable to Russia considering its military defeat, was directed at their own diplomats, who were blamed, but neither they, nor Gómez Carrillo, realized that the treaty was relatively favorable to Russia because Russian strength in the Far East was increasing while Japan’s position was overextended.
Gómez Carrillo reports, he does not condemn, but he is eloquent on the aesthetic marvels of Japan, which he thinks superior to all others:
Yes, human language is powerless to describe these marvels of art, grace, light, harmony and sumptuousness. Merely to say, for example, that the most grandiose of European architecture appears wretched compared with these does not suffice. What difference between the intensity of feeling that one experiences and the coldness of the sentence with which one tries to express it!
This may appear exaggerated, yet I am not unacquainted with the response to the art of other civilizations. When I walk through the gallery of Islamic art in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, I think “This is of incomparable beauty, it is the acme of human creation”; then I walk through the gallery of Indian art and think, “This is of incomparable beauty, it is the acme of human creation”; then I walk through the gallery of Japanese art and think, “This is of incomparable beauty, it is the acme of human creation.” Finally, I pull myself up short and remind myself that art is not a team in a sporting league, and that to appreciate one tradition is not to denigrate another.
Gómez Carrillo, frivolous aesthete turned serious social commentator in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war, saw much to admire in Japan and nothing at all in Russia. Were he to return, would his judgment be very different now?
I have touched on only a small portion of Gómez Carrillo’s work. I find him a protean figure, very difficult to summarize. He was intelligent, bold, brave, charming, talented, cultivated, multifarious, hardworking, and unscrupulous. Perhaps he sums himself up best, describing his childhood:
I drank life . . . in great mouthfuls, I drank the light, beauty, the joy of growth and enjoyment; I drank from the ardent glass of the tropics, I was intoxicated by the perfume of flowers, by the color of the sky, by the smiles of girls, by the caresses of my mother.
This essay is adapted from Buried But Not Quite Dead: Forgotten Writers of Père Lachaise, by Anthony Daniels, published by Criterion Books this month.
