The Man, the Woman and the Writer

Biographies are not the cup of coffee of Spanish writers. Even the best biographies of their most eminent writer, Miguel de Cervantes, are Anglo-Saxon in origin. Lives of Cervantes have been written mainly by Spanish philosophers, like Miguel de Unamuno and Jose Ortega y Gasset, but they are mere disquisitions and inquisitions about the main characters, the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and his squire. They are in fact prosaic versions of “The Man from La Mancha” after reading Kierkegaard and Spengler. Though it was Oscar Wilde who said, “Biography lends to death a new terror,” Suzanne Jill Levine’s recent biography of Manuel Puig brings the main character of his books, Manuel himself, back to life.

Born in a small town in the Argentine pampa in 1932, Manuel Puig died at 58 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1990. In opposition to many of his contemporaries, Puig wrote a considerable number of letters that are, like their writer, sexually explicit, informative and funny. The first letter by Puig that I read was given to me by his close friend, the late cinematographer Nestor Almendros, in Havana in the early ‘50s. Almendros had known Puig at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Cinecitta, established by none other than dictator Benito Mussolini in Rome during his heyday in the ‘30s. Puig signed his letter with a pseudonym for his alter ego, Sally, the name he borrowed from his idol, Rita Hayworth, in “My Gal Sal” (1942), a minor movie. But for Puig there were no minor movies, not this one anyway. Almendros had come back to Havana from Italy with a novel idea for a young critic: It was the stars--or in any case the renown actors--who actually made the films in which they appeared. It was a contrary idea to la politique des auteurs avant les films of Truffaut et al--to be enunciated two years later.

Ten or more years passed. The journal Cahiers du Cinema, the banner of les auteurs and their politique, revealed itself as la politique des auteurs politiques. Almendros had left Cuba and so had I. He was busy becoming a cinematographer of the first rank and was living in Paris. I was living in Madrid then but was leaving for Barcelona to deliver the finished manuscript of my “Tres tristes tigres” to Carlos Barral, the boss of the publishing house Seix-Barral and the head of the literary contest I had won two years before. I invited--or rather forced--Barral to come to the cinema to see “Dr. Strangelove.” It was a reluctant Barral, a man who hated movies and called English a barbarian’s language. Fortunately the film was dubbed into Spanish (but not into Catalan--not yet anyway). On our way to the movie theater, we had to pick up poet Jaime Gil de Biedma at his favorite watering hole. It was then that I asked Barral about the possible winner of that year’s prize. He said that there were two favorites, one of them called “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” by Puig. I jumped at his mentioning it and said vehemently, “It should get the prize only for its title!” Little did I know that also coming with us would be Juan Marse, a Catalan writer who actually won the prize with a novel whose title I no longer remember.

Remorse or guilt or both later made Barral despise Puig’s novel, and thus he gained a place in the dictionary of bad decisions as the publisher who had rejected in 16 months three novels in a row: “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” “From Cuba with a Song” by Severo Sarduy and “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Puig was born in a small town called General Villegas but, as he put it, “I grew up on the pampa in a bad dream or rather a bad western.” But he actually was born into a movie house or rather into a dream house. Like the boy in “Cinema Paradiso,” he was an infant in paradise, which is almost the title of one of his favorite films, “The Children of Paradise.” As his biographer, Suzanne Jill Levine, writes, Puig was always “hoping to wake up to find that real life was the daily matinee imported from Hollywood.” Loving and living in the movies was the same dream to him, but he always wanted to be not a movie hero but a film diva, “like Norma Shearer.” Levine writes that Puig “would immerse himself in movie magazines.” “I even went so far,” confessed Puig, “as to cut out ads for the coming attractions.” Movie magazines and newspapers came from Buenos Aires, though Puig and his immediate family “lived 12 hours by train” from the capital city.

Manuel was obsessed by movies. Levine remembers meeting him, years later, for a Chinese dinner in New York. The following afternoon they met to see a movie at the Film and Cultural Center on Columbus Circle, a special showing of Ben Hecht’s screwball satire “Nothing Sacred” (1937), with Carole Lombard and Fredric March, two of Manuel’s favorites. Levine recalls: “He sat silently, staring with those big eyes as the audience laughed continuously at the rapid-fire dialogue and shenanigans. Suddenly--during a nightclub scene in which the svelte, inebriated Lombard stands up, daintily tottering, and the audience quietly awaits the next wisecrack. . . . I heard an exclamation pitched beside us in the dark vast hall: “Ay, que traje divino!” [What a divine dress!]. [I] looked, startled, at Manuel, his eyes lit by his own enthusiasm even more than by the luminous screen. Divino--another of those over-the-top Argentine utterances--meant that, as far as he was concerned, the satin gown clinging to immortal Carole’s sleek curves was the only note worth taking on this occasion.”

From his movie dreams and real-life longings sprang his first novel, “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” (1968). Puig said: “I didn’t choose literature. Literature chose me.” Though it was a hit, a palpable hit, his novel was first a dream, then a screenplay and last a book. The novel came out of a failed script, written in his horas perdidas when working as an employee of the French airlines at La Guardia Airport in New York. From that busy environment came one of the most original novels ever written in Spanish. Its originality was in its curious final form: It was written in dialogues. This, then, simply wasn’t done. His muse, like Minerva, came fully formed out of the then-despised pop culture. Many years later, he found a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett in which “her plot was realized almost exclusively through dialogue.” She, like Manuel, “dispensed with conventional authorial comment.” He was not surprised that the English novelist was also homosexual but resented that she was treated as a respected author while he was considered only a pop novelist. He was derided by his South American colleagues, especially by Julio Cortazar, who publicly considered Puig not only a feminine reader but a homosexual writer as well. In a double irony, Cortazar ended up by writing the novel, “We Love Glenda So Much.” The loved one was the actress Glenda Jackson and the title came from “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” of course.

Puig’s next novel, “Heartbreak Tango,” was subtitled “A Serial.” Instead of taking inspiration from the movies, here he delved into the world of the novelette, a popular literary genre everywhere. Titled in Spanish “Boguitas pintadas,” rendered initially in English as “Those Little Painted Lips,” it was a masterpiece and very successful in Argentina and the Spanish-speaking world. “Heartbreak” “traces overlapping love triangles in Colonel Vallejos but, in opposition to ‘Betrayed,’ is not an autobiographical novel.” It follows the pattern of the novelitas, to the critics worse than the penny dreadful but for its readers, mostly women, the stuff love dreams are made of. The narration is divided by true confessions barely disguised, letters and lots and lots of humble aspirations and catastrophic realizations: His protagonist is a very handsome man, a lady-killer in fact, who sickens and dies of tuberculosis, the favorite illness of romantic novels. It is a heartbreaking book and, apart from “The Kiss of the Spider Woman,” his best-written.

After writing many novels (“The Buenos Aires Affair: A Detective Novel,” “Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages,” “Blood of Requited Love,” “Pubis Angelical,” all translated into English, French, Italian, et cetera), Puig died. It is the successful task of this biography to bring him back to life. Here you have the complete Puig, the writer and also his private alter ego, Sally. Manuel used to say that he never came out of the closet because he was there before the closet was even built. Puig was born a man but everything he wanted was to be a woman, una mujer normal, a normal woman to boot. For him a woman was not only superior to the man but also the repository of beauty and the soul: a human being that did not want realism, as Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois, but fantasy. Puig and Williams had a lot in common as writers and as men: Both lived in a woman’s world, in fiction and in fact; both were extremely sensitive, and both loved men and swimming in that order. To top it all, his favorite characters were suffering females, even if they were born men.

Everything you wanted to hear about Puig, Sally and Manuel himself is here in this biography: not warts but beauty spots and all. Some gays (Puig would never have used that word: For him every male homosexual was a female) have criticized Puig’s use and abuse of the article la (no matter who the bearer was). But they do not have Puig in front of them to hear him calling famous people (la Hurt, la Babenco, la Julia) without derision or scorn but with his perverse, pervasive sense of humor--even when his main target was himself. Once, after he became famous, I advised him to conduct his convoluted affairs in a professional manner and hire an agent, even a press agent, and he disarmed me saying: “I don’t need agents; I’m a career woman.” And he was not a careerist but a man who knew how to manage--he would have said handle--his affairs. Sometimes with a little help from his guardian angels who could read the small print.

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Once he had an affair with a Mexican diplomat--another Buenos Aires affair--and he followed him to Mexico--only to find out that his lover was a schizo who wanted to run over every maricon who crossed his car’s path. Terrified, Puig prayed to Saint Joan. Not of Arc but Crawford, who, in “Autumn Leaves,” was almost killed by Cliff Robertson using a typewriter as a weapon. “Saint Joan saved me!” he claimed in earnest.

There were many similar stories about encounters with those whom he called malos hombres but not hombres malos. Manuel made lists of these mauveses rencontres, but one day he produced the ultimate list of men who had become women: writers all in a row. I called it “La lista de Manuel” (Manuel’s List). [See “Christmas List” on opposite page.]

This list of authors became Manuel Puig’s main contribution to literary criticism of Spanish American literature. Ten years after he died, his bones keep rattling on.

This excellent biography is not only Levine’s best work but also Puig’s lasting triumph. Here are the man, the woman and the writer, his life sometimes serious, sometimes sad, always gay and finally, like all lives, tragically ended. His is the triumph over the writers that tagged him with the brand mark of not being un ecrivain engage, an engaged writer. (Is that a crime?) But Juan Goytisolo, his true discoverer, said in his obituary that Manuel was not only a great writer but “a tenacious defender of the rights of women and homosexuals in a ferociously macho world.” To add more precisely: “[He] with honesty and dignity, captured reality despite the mists of fear and the bandaged eyes of ideologies.” Those pseudo-engage writers who divide readers between male (the active reader) or female (the passive one). Or the practitioners of magic realism that are mere versions of Carmen Miranda: the writers with the tutti-frutti art.

Every biography, contrary to Wilde’s dictum, is constantly aspiring to the condition of history. With “Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman,” Puig has entered into a history more valid--the history of literature.