I first read Henry Miller in 1991. I had bought a vintage paperback of Tropic of Capricorn for $.50 at a neighborhood book fair, held in the parking lot of what was then the Sav-On at the corner of Sepulveda and Manchester, in Westchester, California. I had finished high school two years earlier and was eager to read all of those good bad books I knew existed, but for which Sister C., a spindly woman with a wild eye and a lisp, had made no room in the shelves of my school library.
I was ecstatic to have found Henry Miller—so close to Arthur Miller, I thought perhaps I’d be rereading Death of a Salesman. I’d been duped. Willy Loman in Brooklyn was nothing like Henry Miller in Brooklyn—although, if obliged, one could always make the case to the contrary. The novel, not the play, opens like this:
Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. (Tropic of Capricorn, 9)
After that—how to say?—“bleak” introduction, it became clear to me that this would be the kind of reading that would throw me full-throttle into late adolescence. Beyond the first few pages, the graphic sexual content of the novel would have sent poor Sister C. into an apoplectic seizure. And me, well, before Miller, the closest I’d read to “graphic” was a poem titled, “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time,” by the English Romantic poet Robert Herrick. Miller’s writing—I found—was autobiographical, crass, rebellious, but also playful and humorous, in spite of his better judgment. He called attention to himself, his body, and his writing, in a way that was and is adolescent—if adolescence still means abandon, chaos, and revolt. Spellbound, I read along.
The ‘90s came and went, and I settled reluctantly into maturity. As an adult reader, and one often overwhelmed by an insurmountable heap of books—written, unwritten, overly written, or otherwise only in my imagination—I haven’t had the time nor the desire to revisit Miller. I had shut the door on Miller the way one shuts the door on the latent AquaNet in the bathroom closet and the last surviving Depeche Mode concert tee shirt. Never to be seen again. Not until Cuba in Splinters.
Edited by Cuban writer and photographer, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo (also one of the contributors), and translated by Hillary Gulley, Cuba in Splinters: Eleven Stories from the New Cuba (2014), constitutes a series of fragments, but not in the sense that we might expect. These unruly stories are not the metaphorical fallen fragments of a ruined landscape. This is millennial Cuba and people, ideas, words are splinters flying off the page, knocking into each other, collapsing, taking off again. There are no clear boundaries here: Love, masturbation, super heroes that stop time, nearly orphaned adult-children running wild, or waiting for a train, stolen manuscripts, and—in no particular order—zombies and Henry Miller. The stories in this collection belong to an urban space and, specifically, to a Cuban social reality where boredom, exile, disenchantment, hunger, poetry, sex, and carollian word play make up Ground Zero.
There are eleven stories in total, evidence (I think) of Pardo Lazo’s attempt to avoid easy, stable signifiers and inadvertent symbolic gestures. Perhaps the twelfth story would have been a heavy-handed attempt at a kind of grand and totalizing truth—an impossible and even ridiculous endeavor, if we consider the chaotic nature of splinters. And yet, love is possible—surprising, yet inevitable.
Such is the case of “Fefita and the Berlin Wall,” by Jorge Alberto Aguiar Díaz. This first story in the collection begins (or ends) as a great love story—but these lovers are far from Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. For one, there’s no piano player. The story begins like this:
Back then I was seeing Fefita, a fifty-year-old black woman with saggy tits and an armored ass. I was JAAD, the visitor, dragging my feet, ideas, and all the paper with the scribbles of my porn novel.
Fefita and JAAD inhabit a Havana crowded with beggars, prostitutes, criminals, lunatics, and policemen. When they hear the news that communism has fallen in the Soviet Union, they—along with everyone else—take to the streets and wait. The rest, as the reader may be forced to conclude, is a new Cuban literature.
I move from one story to the next, as if through familiar territory, turning this and that page, with the certainty you feel when you leave the house one morning that you’re going to run into someone you know. However, it is not until Ahmel Echevarría Peré’s “Cuba in Splinters,” the story that gives the collection its title, that I run into Henry M.:
Orlando L. and Henry M. are in the habit of visiting my room. It’s as if they plan to arrive at the same time. They appear together, famished, their tongues hanging out like two street dogs. They don’t leave until very late.
I recognize Orlando L. immediately—or, at least, I think so. Quickly, I make a mental list of the Orlandos I know: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Orlando Bloom—that’s it. But he’s none other than Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, the unruly editor of the collection, (fictionalized?) of course. I pause, then get closer to the page to bring Henry M. into focus. Henry Miller? I know you! Then I remember how much time has passed. Would he recognize me? We form bonds with writers we read during our adolescent years that are not unlike the bonds we make and break with high school friends. And yet, running into people from our past is something of an anachronism. There’s something odd about Henry Miller in Havana that makes me feel both excited and confused. What time is it in Havana that the likes of Henry Miller may visit anyone, with the likes of Orlando L.?
The narrator explains:
We’re fragments that can hardly be rebuilt within Cuba. Splinters. What can you make with a pile of splinters? Nothing. Henry, Orlando and Yani say otherwise. “We’ll make something out of this trash, we’ll do a lot with all this rubble, you’ll see, little splintered doll, you’ll see everything and it will all be clearer. Don’t turn into a little bitch and stay that way like a fucked lunatic. You know you’ll encounter the void wherever you go, it will be there, waiting for you. Everything is pure fiction, nothing but metaphor.
Because no story about Cuba is complete without an attempt at return, in Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo’s “The Man, the Wolf and the New Woods,” Diego, the self-proclaimed Red Matahari from Senel Paz’s novel by a similar title, returns to Havana. With the “definitive UNPUBLISHED work of José Lezama Lima” reeking under his armpit, Diego walks the island’s capital city—hot and provincial, in the daylight; but electric and beautiful at night. He encounters his old friends one by one: first Román, then David, then Nancy. Diego’s experience with old friends resonates with my own and I am ultimately moved. For Diego, however, venturing into the past is not as simple as re-reading (or ridding oneself of) a good bad book, even if the book is not a book at all, but the missing pages of Lezama Lima’s Opianno Licario. In the following passage, Diego contemplates what would become of those pages were he to hurl them into the air from the highest point in the city:
What might become of Summula/ never suffused/ with morphological exceptions can be best understood as follows: papers in the wind, tossed to fate, a zeppelin of zeugmas zipping through the claustrophobic atmosphere of my ex-city, an equation that wasn’t as much teleological as it was meteorological. It sounds so philosophical and still, it could all end with a fecal performance: imagine, a Cuban poetically wiping his ass with the posthumous prose of Oppiano Licario. A light and laughable destiny in the midst of such terrestrial totalitarian ideology. A project I realized was unachievable, after thirty minutes of contemplation, as soon as I noticed that the glass panels at the observation deck were hermetic, just like the total paradise inhabited by the characters invented by José Lezama Lima.
Starting with the editor’s preface, these eleven stories constitute a way of being honest, or at least less dishonest. They are irreverent; experimental in ways that seem more rebellious than transcending. And yet, much like Miller’s, these are the sort of stories that create a world of their own and, as George O. once wrote, leave a certain flavor behind them. For the characters in these stories, and I venture say, for the writers, he’s one way of breaking off—albeit like splinters—into the future. Discovering Henry M. in this collection is like running into a high school friend decades after graduation. It’s awkward, at first—but you soon pickup where you left off. Every age must decide for itself how to part with the past: which writers (and friends) we carry with us and which we leave behind depends entirely on what we need to say from this point forward.
Cuba in Splinters. Eleven Stories from the New Cuba.
Edited by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Paperback: 224 pages
Published: OR Books (2014)
ISBN-13: 978-1-939293-48-0