Vol. 14 No. 21 · 5 November 1992
pages 30-31 | 3667 words
Allendistas
D.A.N. Jones
- Death in Chile: A Memoir and a Journey by Tony Gould
Picador, 277 pp, £15.99, July 1992, ISBN 0 330 32271 0
- Some write to the future by Ariel Dorfman, translated by George Shivers and Ariel Dorfman
Duke, 271 pp, £10.95, May 1992, ISBN 0 8223 1269 7
For the British, South America is perhaps the darkest of the continents: only rarely and faintly has it entered our history, provoked our armies, disturbed our empire and commonwealth. ‘Ford Cortina,’ said the late Poet Laureate, rather sniffily: ‘it sounds like a South American.’ We can’t easily imagine what it’s like to be one: their fiction is obscured by the charms of Magical Realism. Their political spasms trouble us less than those of Europe or Africa, Bosnia or Somalia. We might meet them in our student days. I remember a Chilean who rebuffed the college manciple: ‘Are you asking me or are you telling me – peasant?’ Similarly, Tony Gould met a Chilean caballero, when they were Cambridge undergraduates, some thirty years ago. He was called Cristian Huneeus, a young man of landed family, a gentlemanly left-winger and already a published novelist. In those days, British readers were not so interested in South American fiction as they have since become, and few indeed were those who took an interest in South American politics – apart perhaps from worrying about the imperious interventions of North Americans, so eager to counter the threat of Communism in their hemisphere.
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 23 · 3 December 1992
From Tony Gould
I was flattered that you should invite such a distinguished and long-serving reviewer as D.A.N. Jones to cover my book, Death in Chile (LRB, 5 November). Some years ago, in my biography of Colin MacInnes, I paid tribute to his precocious talents as a literary reviewer (out of a becoming modesty, no doubt, he doesn’t mention this book in an otherwise comprehensive rundown of my curriculum vitae). So when I found I didn’t recognise the book I was reading about – despite copious quotation – I took another look at it to see if I had been deluding myself; and of course I had. I must apologise not only to those who may have been rash enough to part with nearly £16 for a book about a Chilean whose ‘life and death … do not seem very dramatic, not remarkable at all’, but also to readers of this journal who had to endure a page and a half about his unremarkable life and mine. Mr Jones was only doing his painful duty in dealing with them at such length before moving on to the more rewarding task of praising another Chilean, the justly celebrated Ariel Dorfman, to whom I had referred slightingly in passing. Mea culpa.
One test of a reviewer, as of a writer, is how much he knows about the subject he’s addressing. Mr Jones passes this effortlessly. He knows more about me than I do – ‘He became, he thinks, rather left-wing’ (my italics) – more about my friend Cristian, too, who died ‘peacefully’, he says at one point, and ‘quietly’ at another, when I had omitted altogether to mention the manner of his death. But where he is most authoritative is in his understanding of Chile – about which he can quote from John Gunther’s ‘reliable Inside Latin America (1967)’ – and its people, particularly those ‘who had stayed put’ through the Pinochet era ‘surviving or collaborating’. These are ‘nice people, speaking good English’, he tells us, but ‘not very useful informants about a dictatorship’. One might imagine that such people would be the most useful informants, but they’re not, ‘they are too discreet’ – as I would have known if I had been, as Mr Jones was, in Greece in the Seventies or Iraq in the Eighties. I take what crumbs of comfort I can from Mr Jones’s subtle prose, as when he writes ‘Gould immediately adds a seeming non sequitur’ – thank God it wasn’t a real one. But I am suitably chastened when he penetrates my pathetic pretence of writing a book about Chile and Pinochet and reveals that what actually interests me is ‘the development of a type of Englishman, guilty about independent schools, cross with Mrs Thatcher’: in other words – though he is too kind to spell it out – a wet.
Tony Gould
Newton Abbot, Devon
