Katherine Anne Porter (141 page)

December 10, 1941

N
EWSPAPER
notes gathered into a book make patchwork reading. Even Lafcadio Hearn’s republished “Fantasies” could not survive the test. Six months after they are written, Blasco Ibanez’ hurried observations on Mexico in Revolution are staler than even half year old news has any right to be. Tacit forgiveness is extended to daily potboilers in the swift forgetfulness accorded them. When the reporter seeks to revive and perpetuate his mistakes as literature, or even as propaganda, he invites the irritation of the reader.

Ordinarily, one does not review newspaper notes, even though the writer of them is “the most magnificent reporter in the world” as some sly critic dubbed the prolific Spaniard, who has discovered there is money in writing if you write fast enough and badly enough. Yet for one blazing moment when he was younger, he was an artist. He wrote “The Cabin.” He was a revolutionary in those days, too, and spent eighteen months in prison for the sake of his political faith.

No doubt as one grows older things are different. Even a fellow countryman of Don Quixote tilts with no windmills at sixty or thereabout. It is better to stand solidly with editors and publishers who buy much and pay well. It is better to write racy, clever stuff: to tell quarter-truths amusingly and convincingly, than to content one’s self with the obscure honor of having created “The Cabin.”

I read portions of Ibanez’ notes on Mexico when they were appearing serially in a New York newspaper. I read them again this week in a book decorated on both sides of the slip cover with an inconsiderately homely photograph of the late Carranza posing with Ibanez. They are evidently conversing on a
subject painful to them both. Cordial intent is not visibly established. Ibanez is blinking in that strong light he claims Carranza always forced the visitor to face during interviews. Carranza’s manner is nicely divided between boredom and suspicion.

The boredom was his personal affair, but he did well to be suspicious. It would have been better for many other Mexicans if they had been a little less frank in their welcome of the visiting third cousin who embraced them in order to feel of their pistol belts: who led them on to talk about themselves with humorous carelessness in order that he, the visiting third cousin, should be enabled to prove afterward in print what a very clever, knowing sort of chap he was. “See how I understand these people,” you may imagine Ibanez saying. “Note the ease with which I tripped them up, and obtained their simple secrets. Really, dear friends, I was as amusing as a weasel in a Rat hole!”

I marvel again at his inverted Latin wit, his gift for stripping the personal dignity from a fellow creature, with deliberate intent so to strip him before as wide a public as he can muster. I resent his not dealing clean wounds that bleed freely. I protest against his sadistic pastime of removing an inch of skin at a time with a razor edge.

He attacks all of us insidiously at points where we are without protection. Who believes in militarism? Who does not feel for the sufferings of the poor peon? His indignation against the one, his proper sympathy for the other are sentiments beyond reproach. Who can help smiling over his sardonic account of the Mexican “soldierette,” or laughing outright over the infernally amusing story of Don Jesús Carranza and the Red Cow in Hell?

That is the trouble with this affair. His malice touches the kindred spark of malice in all of us. Blasco Ibanez brought with him to Mexico—Blasco Ibanez. He carried about with him his taste for scandal—his will to believe evil of all he saw. He talked with everybody who had a shady story to tell. Over cafe tables and on street corners he gathered together the most trivial and scandalous untruths ever put between book covers as a serious account of a nation, carefully mixed with an occasional grain of fact when its exclusion would have been too glaringly obvious.
Any one like-minded could spend a short time in any capital of the world and come away with a similar collection of anecdotes.

He brought with him intellectual snobbishness—witness the “Belasco” story—and racial hatred he owns to in words between words. For six whole weeks he sat at cafe tables or stood on street corners discovering the truth about Mexico in Revolution. Then he went away and wrote a delightful, an informing, a profoundly truthful mental autobiography of Blasco Ibanez!

If the reader knew nothing of Mexico except the political propaganda published for years in American journals, it might be very easy to believe nearly all of this book.

It races along so fluently, never at a loss for a word, with a keen and poisonous little anecdote capping each incident sharply. He speaks fairly well of the dead—of Díaz, of Carranza, of Zapata; indiscriminately he scatters a few kindly, condescending words upon these harmless graves. But it is nearly always in order to point more precisely the villainy of some one now in power. Living men at work he hates, it seems.

For young de la Huerta he has a sentence of praise to stress his contention that there are no other idealists in all the government of Mexico. Reading his book, one remembers acquaintance with enough flaming and disinterested revolutionary idealists to employ the fingers of two hands in naming them, and is willing on the strength of that knowledge to admit the existence of numberless others one has never met, and will never hear of. But one feels that somewhere along the road, late or early, Ibanez has laid down his burden of faith in his kind, and groaningly cannot make shift to take it up again. He has taken masters, and serves them excellently well.

He writes always with a weather eye on these masters. Now and again he tucks in sweet pilules of flattery for the delectation of the great northern public for whom he wrote. Deftly he tickles the ear of the white man who indirectly made it worth his while to write this book.

And, ironically and caustically, with relish and innuendo, with much dropping of the eyelid and sweet turning of phrase would he delight a Spanish audience with an account of that
so-amusing America he has just discovered if a Spanish publisher decided to make it worth his while.

It is not likely to happen. They have never made it worth Ibanez’ while in Spain. Let him fill American platters with his spiced and vinegared scandal-mongering between nations. That is the logical place for it. But it should be devoured and forgotten by the third day.

I shall not pretend that these books present unbiased opinions of conclusions on the problem of Mexican-American relations, for liberalism has a bias of its own. The main virtue of the liberal temperament is its almost pious regard for the facts, its genius for patient research: for me, the wonder of the liberal temperament is that no amount of findings can upset its preconceived theories. Earth hath no sorrows that a firm mild course of popular education cannot cure.

It is true that ill-regimented minded are inclined to be noisy, warm and argumentative, and there is something about the Mexican question that raises the hackles even on the peaceful minded. These admirable books contain all the elements of free-for-all controversy, but all is so adroitly smoothed away there is nothing in the tone to frighten the most timid liberal. Four diverse, informed and civilized minds have here collaborated in presenting quite horrifying facts in an almost painless form. In this series of lectures they tested their theories of education before the Chicago Annual Institute, and it is cheerful
to think that hundreds, maybe even thousands of students went away from there happy in the thought that nations may be taught understanding of each other by gentle degrees, as children are led from one grade to another. Even oil magnates may be taught international good manners by suggestion. In this thought everybody may happily go to sleep and leave the job of teaching them to some one else.

Each of these four gentlemen is an expert in his subject, a fine flower of academic culture. They share an Olympian balance in viewing all sides of a question. If at times Mr. Saenz shows fight he controls himself quickly, remembers his rôle of mediator, and gives a superhumanly just statement of the present intolerable situation in Mexico due to foreign investments, the condition of Mexican labor and the problem of rural education. He is a nationalist, a good one, I should like to hear him speak more freely. But he remains well within the bounds of what is expected from a foreign lecturer before an institute, and ends on a note of optimism scarcely warranted by the facts he has managed to expose. I suspect him of radical tendencies. Given a chance, I believe he would be warm and noisy. The balance of his head is threatened by the insurgence of his heart.

Mr. Vasconcelos, former secretary of education in Mexico, has for some years past occupied himself with promoting peaceful relationship between the Latin countries of America. He is equally opposed to the present system of government in these countries—dictatorship or caudillism—and foreign interference. He professes faith, more especially in the Mexican Indian, and rejects alien paternalism, but preaches a vast religious native paternalism fully as debilitating to his people. Mr. Vasconcelos has an incurable, almost romantic faith in the perfectibility of human nature, and his plan roughly is this: the lion and the lamb have essential differences, it is true, but one should reason with the lion and persuade him not to eat the lamb. In the meantime, the lamb shall be given a few setting up exercises that will enable him to hold his own with the lion in case one or the other of these essential differences should crop up in their future together.

Aside from this he gives an excellent historical survey of Mexico.

Into Mr. Priestley’s scholarly essay creeps now and again his
sense of responsibility as big brother of Mexico. He, with the others, is pleased that the Ford and the phonograph are now commonplaces of Mexican life. He believes in sane, conservative propaganda for Mexico, such as these books represent, setting aside all the roaring of distempered radicals and frivolous reports by prosperous Chamber of Commerce gentlemen. Truth being, of course, our aim, I only wish that these honest men and good investigators could manage to be half so entertaining as the liars and hotheads. There must be some way of making facts attractive! Why do not these liberals find it?

In his first chapter Mr. Priestley is gloomy as death about sickness in Mexico. But this, he says, is being remedied. Sanitary measures are being enforced, active steps taken against contagion and infection, a study of regional diseases promises a cure of them. These things are good, who could quarrel with them? But they continually miscall this sort of thing civilization. Maybe it is, and I am thinking of something else: I am persuaded it is too tall a name for our cult of machinery and the bathtub. Still the standard of washing and eating in Mexico remains very low.

The average of washing and eating in the United States is, as you know, unnaturally high. We have our bread lines, true, and miners’ strikes, and the garment workers of this superlatively clothed nation have a permanent grievance, and the silk manufacturers will tell you that if we wear silk, even at excessive prices, a certain number of workers must live in acute discomfort. In the South we persist in the aristocratic old tradition, of Negro peonage, and there is a discouraging percentage of poor whites whose insides are riddled with the hookworm. We are exceedingly rude to multitudes of our foreign population, and what with our modern efficient methods of banditry, somebody should hold a round-table discussion about us.

But this round-table is about Mexico, so let us get on. Mr. Gamio is a true scientist; I feel he has come nearer to the real life of his own country than either of his compatriots or the liberal minded Mr. Priestley. During his work as director of the Bureau of Anthropology he made a profound sympathetic study of racial origins. His findings presented him with his own special phase of the Mexican problem: that of incorporating this deep-grounded native Indian life with the modern
mixed currents of Mexican culture. This incorporation would result in a recognized Indian nation instead of a three-layer, disorganized structure of white, mestizo and Indian. He knows that Mexico and the Indian belong to each other, and consistently refuses to regard him as other than the rightful owner and proprietor of his country. He recognizes the futility of imposing on the Indian customs and standards alien to him: considers the economic and geographical factors and the human one.

The appeal has not all been aimed at the altruistic spirit which may or may not function, according to the weather, in the bosom of man. Each lecturer in turn has pointed out that there would be money, good solid gold to be had out of Mexico in exchange for the same rules of commerce and diplomacy that more important nations are able to enforce from us. They recommend that the wealth now concentrated in the hands of a few vast corporations be loosed and allowed to flow through a thousand new channels, reminding us that there are other riches in Mexico besides oil.

These are books to be read for solid information. The remedies suggested are so very slow the problems they are intended to solve will have died by nature, decayed and reflowered into something else, before they could begin to take effect. Cleaning up is dirty work, this is a mere project for washing face and hands. The thundering racket you hear outside is Mexico getting her pockets picked by her foreign investors.