Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) by Roberto Bolaño

affirming, and
perhaps with good reason, that his work was as brilliant as his life was dull.
He came from a humble background, worked as a grammar school teacher, got
married at twenty and fathered seven children; his life was a series of moves
from post to post—always in small towns or mountain villages—and economic
hardships, seasoned with family tragedies and personal affronts.
    His first poems were adolescent imitations of Campoamor, Espronceda
and the Spanish Romantics. At the age of twenty-one, he was published for the
first time in
Southern Flowers
, a magazine devoted to “agriculture,
stockbreeding, education and fishing,” edited at the time by a group of grammar
school teachers from Concepción and Talcahuano, whose leading light was
Florencio Capó, a friend of the poet since childhood. At twenty-four, according
to his biographers, González tried to get a second poem published, this time in
the
Journal of the Pedagogical Institute of Santiago
. Capó, who by then
had moved to the capital and was among the journal’s contributors, submitted the
poem, as he would later say, sight unseen, and it was published along with
twenty other texts by as many poets, who were teachers in Santiago or, for the
most part, in the provinces, and who made up the core of the magazine’s
readership. The scandal was immediate and momentous, albeit limited to Chile’s
teaching community.
    The poem was a far, far cry from the blandishments of Campoamor; in
thirty precise and limpid verses, it vindicated Il Duce’s vilified armies and
the derided courage of the Italians (who, at the time, in both pro-Allied and
pro-German circles, were assumed to be a race of cowards; for instance, in
relation to a possible border conflict with the Italianized Argentineans, a
Santiago politician had famously remarked that with a company of good Chilean
border guards the government could halt and rout a division of invading wops),
while also, and here lay its originality, denying Italy’s flagrant defeat, and
promising an ultimate victory, to be achieved “by novel, unexpected, marvelous
means.”
    As a result of the furor—of which González, teaching at the time in a
remote village somewhere near Santa Bárbara, was informed by three letters, in
one of which Capó disapproved of González’s position, reaffirmed his friendship
and washed his hands of the whole matter—the magazine
Iron Heart
attempted to contact the poet, and the Ministry of Education added his name to a
long and futile list of possible Fascist fifth columnists.
    His next venture into print dates from 1947. It consists of three
poems which blend lyric and narrative impulses, as well as modernist and
surrealist metaphors, employing images that are, at times, disconcerting:
González sees men in armor, “Merovingians from another planet,” walking down
endless wooden corridors; he sees blond women sleeping in the open beside putrid
streams; he sees machines whose functions he dimly intuits as they move through
dark nights, their headlights shining “like diadems of canine teeth.” He sees,
but does not describe, acts that frighten him, but to which he feels
irresistibly drawn. The action unfolds not in this world but in a parallel
universe where “Will and Fear are one and the same.”
    The following year, he published another three poems in
Iron
Heart
, which by then had moved its editorial operations to Punta
Arenas. These poems revisit the same scenes and recreate the same atmospheres as
the previous three, with slight variations. In a letter to his friend Capó,
dated March 8, 1947, along with the usual complaints about his job and tales of
familial woe, González reveals that his poetic illumination took place in the
summer of 1943, during which he was visited for the first time by the
extraterrestrial Merovingians. But did they visit him in a dream or in reality?
On that point González remains unclear. In the letter to Capó, he reflects at
length on glossolalia,