I am impressed by the fact that the literatures that Fombona reads and likes best are French, Italian, Russian. He sought literatures which could inspire him, which held the contagion of heat, Saxon races are colder, weaker perhaps in art-sense. They peg along diligently—more pedantically—with the consuming of many words like a faulty engine giving out smoke. I am carrying along as I say this, an undercurrent of memory of the stories of the English Buchan, which are so deadly dull; uninspired; devoid of artistry, of life. To me his books are sediment ... after sometime, somewhere, the pure, the sparkling wine has been withdrawn. Only rare humorless Americans could read them.
The great earthquake in Caracas as Blanco-Fombona shows it to us, is masterly. And over it, the calm of night, and the yellow, resplendent moon of the tropics. I had a thrill from this chapter.
Fombona was fascinated by the racial problem of the Americas, just as I have been. He insists the great problem here is racial. To quote him: “There is no racial unity, and consequently no national ideal.... We may not depend upon them of mixed blood, because now one element predominates, and now another, which education breaks up and still more confuses. Out of three Venezuelans—white, negro, and Indian, who could tell what could blend their energies into one? In each case the ideals are different; they have different tastes, different political impulses. We have no national soul.”
One of Fombona’s friends in old Spain, tells us how greatly Fombona is repelled by a commercial, highly mechanized civilization, because such things go against the grain of his exalted subjectivity, his belief in the spiritual elite. He says Fombona hates equally what he calls Teutonic force and prosaic, Yankee-loving money-grubbing. And especially he hates democracies, because they are arbitrary, leveling, destructive of the aristocrat—and North Americans. La Lámpara de Aladino might be termed the breviary of his prejudices.
Somehow it makes me think—The Man of Iron—of youthful books by Turgéniev, such as Father and Sons, Spring Floods ... all show drawing without obtruding outline. There is some similar spiritual quality in the minds that were creating. In his two novels, he is the equal of the great Russian. I like the sheer power of the man! His steel-sharp delineations are memorable. And it has some of the same kind of power as Balzac.
The companion novel—Man of Gold, (El Hombre de Oro).
The chapter in which the three old ladies take pitiful farewell of the grand home of their ancestors, the rich, many-roomed, ancient colonial mansion, with its courts, with its flowers, is a fine piece of writing. It moved me deeply. Not many see the world we are forced to live in as clearly as Fombona, with all the different parts in reasonable and logical relation, not to mention the fine flashing forth to others, the lifting power of vision, that dazzles, then creates. There is both grandeur and fury in the soul of Fombona.
There was a short story writer in Venezuela-Caracas, in the late Eighties, whom I liked. Alejandro Fernandez Garcia. I am still on the watch for the short story of power. Hear this description of music from a story by Garcia. (Again I am translating and quoting from memory.)