Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s preeminent literary figure, dies, leaving the post that combined elegance and eloquence empty

“Literary Great, Carlos Fuentes, Dies.” A headline that did not exaggerate. Fuentes had become Mexico’s “greatest living author” April 19, 1998, the day that Mexico’s only Nobel Laureate in Literature — and Fuentes’ one-time mentor — Octavio Paz, died.

Paz had flashed across the literary sky like a jade meteor with the 1950 publication of his groundbreaking examination of Mexican identity and thought, ‘The Labyrinth of Solitude.” Fuentes was 29 and in Mexico’s diplomatic service when his first novel, “Where the Air is Clear,” 1958, became a literary triumph. Both men, along with other south-of-the-border writers, were vigorously fanning the fuse of what soon would be known worldwide as “El Boom,” a lavish Latin American explosion of aesthetic accomplishment.

Fuentes died this past Tuesday, May 15. He had been wrestling with heart problems and, say his doctors, a severe hemorrhage prompted by frequent aspirin use for his heart trouble killed him. He was 83. An eloquent, dapper and graceful man, Fuentes had, in his 70s, begun to look gaunt, his head eagle-like. He’d finally begun to look his age, said someone who had always envied him his handsomeness.

He was born November 11, 1928 in Panama City, where his father was a member of Mexico’s diplomatic corps. His father’s career meant that Fuentes had an international education, living as a child in Santiago de Chile, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Quito, Montevideo and Washington, in this hemisphere. The family also lived in Rome and Portugal, adding European scope to that education. He learned English when he was four. He picked up French by reading Balzac. He studied law at the National University of Mexico, then international law in Geneva. Thus began the lifelong interest in politics that marked his literary work.

“Where the Air is Clear,” written 1955-1957, portrayed a group of upper-class Mexico City citizens and their preoccupations of that time, which centered on post-Revolutionary Mexicanismo: what it was becoming, and what it should be. Products of the wake of the Revolution, they came from all strata and cultures — indigenous, Spanish and mestizo. Fuentes boldly abandons the traditional linear narrative to depict the encounters of an eclectic group, that represents various social/cultural tendencies. Of this first novel, Fuentes has said that it “reflected ... the excessive and somewhat mythical preoccupation over nationality, ancestry and patrimony rampant then in Mexico. At the same time it aspired to give a critical report on the Revolution.” An admirable, needed objective. But it is a first novel, and often veers into the random and disjointed, a gaudy montage, sometimes over explicit, sometimes “dazzled by its own virtuosity.“ Unkindly influenced by European literature, it is a talkative novel. Confrontations tend to be verbal rather than acted out. Like many writers of that era, Fuentes was influenced by Jon Dos Passos‘ “U.S.A.” and by both James Joyce and William Faulkner. (Faulkner, especially, had a great influence on Latin American writers.) Particularly, for aficionados of Mexico, this first novel is a useful look at the post-World War II cultural dilemmas of a certain strata of Mexican society.

As for a searing and penetrating report on Mexico‘s 1910-1926 Revolution, that came with Fuentes’ third novel, “The Death of Artemio Cruz” (1962). It dramatically, roughly portrayed the Revolution as an undeniable failure — at a time when that truth was still considered heresy. Thus, the novel remains a unequalled milestone in Mexican literature today. A must-read for all those with an interest in Mexico.

While Fuentes combined his affection for lush sexual encounters and relentless probing of politics — much to the irritation of both the Mexican and U.S. governments — he embraced larger themes such as the implacable hand of history: The long record of the “betrayal of national ideals for personal gain,” the collision of European and indigenous cultures. Among his books most favored north of the border are the “The Old Gringo” (1985), possibly because it was quickly made into a film starring Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda and Jimmy Smitts, and “The Buried Mirror,” (1992), which became a Discovery/BBC five-part mini-series.

“The Old Gringo” was loosely about the disappearance of San Francisco journalist Ambrose Bierce, in Mexico in 1913. In the film, Peck is Bierce, Smitts is a Revolutionary general, and Fonda, at once our escort into the Revolution and the binding love interest.

Just as impressive as this film work is the fact that during the Boom years Fuentes worked relentlessly to introduce new or simply unknown Latin American writers to new audiences: Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982), Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru (Nobel, 2010), Julio Cortazar of Argentina, and many others.

Fuentes, having traveled much as a child, continued that habit. Though he was denied entry visas into the United States in the early 1960s for his independent thought and expression, and for supporting leftist causes, Fuentes noted that “The real bombs are my books, not me.” Congress finally decided he was right and lifted the restrictions. He had supported the Cuban revolution, but withdrew his backing as Fidel Castro grew more and more authoritarian.

He practiced a peripatetic literary and personal life. He socialized with leading internationally known artists and intellectuals: Author William Styron in the U.S., Spain’s great filmmaker, Luis Brunel, Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt. His first wife was Mexican actress Rita Macedo, his second, Mexican journalist Silvia Lemus. Despite a prolific writing career, he was able to engage in other things: he was an essayist, screenwriter, playwright, political provocateur, editor. an ambassador (twice), and cultural historian. His good looks, polyglot eloquence, and literary fame placed him among those inhabiting the international society of prominent artists/intellectuals. His first ten years of marriage, to Rita Macedo, were rocky. Among his affairs were French actress Jeanne Moreau and U.S. actress Jean Seberg.  Though the Nobel escaped his grasp, he received Mexico’s National Prize in Literature, became Harvard’s first Robert Kennedy professor of Latin American Studies, Spain’s King Juan Carlos presented him with the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, France’s National Order of Merit, the highest civilian award given to a foreigner, among others. On his 80th birthday, hundreds gathered at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to mark his life and work.

Fuentes, once he got his visa back, began teaching in U.S. universities, including Brown, Princeton, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cambridge, George Mason University, and was appointed professor-at-large at Brown University.

Fuentes once posed a question to an interviewer: “One wonders, whether the novelist is not doomed to become increasingly marginal as the neocapitalist phenomenon of social and economic pluralism develops in our countries. But always with a transcendent and messianic purpose.” For he believed that “in a perpetually unfinished world there is always something that can be said, something needed that can be expressed only through the art of fiction.”