I had the misfortune of knowing Carlos Fuentes, who died Wednesday at the age of 83 in Mexico City through Octavio Paz, which sounds bizarre considering they are Mexico’s two greatest literary figures of the past century. But sadly, for almost a decade, I found myself wedged between them in what can truly have been called a Mexican standoff.
Their feud, if you can call it that, stemmed from both being great men of letters and rivals as symbols of a nation that both had transcended but still wanted to elevate into the cultural world which made each of them wealthy and famous.
In 1988, Paz’s literary magazine Vuelta published a blistering critique of Fuentes’ work that destroyed a friendship that at the time was already tenuous as they engaged in an ongoing literary dance for the ultimate crowning honor that they both wanted — the Nobel Prize for literature.
Paz, who could be arbitrary and contentious, had a way of sometimes tweaking people just to get a reaction. I had come to know him in the 1970s while I was studying at Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship. Paz held the Charles Eliot Norton professorship in comparative literature, and he turned down my request to study under him based on a 200-word essay on the back of a note card, which was how he selected his graduate students.
A couple of days later he called me to say that he had changed his mind.
“I’m always suspicious of people who say they are writers or want to be writers,” he said. “I feel as though what they want is to spar with me intellectually as if I’m Muhammad Ali, and they want to take me on.”
In the months ahead, I once asked him about Fuentes, and I recall him taking a long, almost exaggerated breath. In the long conversation that followed, Paz seemed to be most critical of Fuentes not about his work but over his politics, especially his early championing of Fidel Castro and later the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. He called Fuentes “un gran novelista, pero un mediocre político.”
Paz considered himself the consummate liberal and a “responsible leftist” but he couldn’t abide the politics of Fuentes, nor of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for that matter.
Those were surprising words coming from a man known as much for being a diplomat as a literary icon, and I suspect the same may have been at play when his magazine made its vituperative attack on Fuentes’ work, even questioning the depth of his Mexican identity.
I wondered how much of the criticism had stemmed from literary jealously. Paz was a brilliant essayist, and “The Labyrinth of Solitude” is a classic study of Mexican identity and thought. But as a creative genius, there was no comparison with Fuentes whose novels captured the complex, convoluted essence of Mexico as never before.
It so happened that just three years before the Vuelta magazine attack, Fuentes’ novel “The Old Gringo” had become the first book by a Mexican novelist to hit the best seller lists north of the border. The novel, about an American writer who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution, was made into a Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.
It also vaulted Fuentes into the world of celebrity, cementing him as the literary voice of Mexico and placing him alongside such great Spanish writers as García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar. Some thought that “The Old Gringo” would also elevate Fuentes to the coveted goal of the Nobel Prize ahead of Paz.
But in 1990, it was Paz who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, laurels that I sense left him with some personal discomfort.
In the early 1990s Paz and I had corresponded on some personal matters on which he was assisting me, and in one of those letters he asked if I would be so kind as to relay a message to Fuentes with whom I was also corresponding.
“Tell Carlos I am extending the olive branch,” he said, obviously seeking to mend the friendship that dated back to the early 1950s.
I relayed the message and got an earful from Fuentes about Paz a year later over dinner in Mexico City.
“He asks you, his student, to do what he should do,” Fuentes said. “It’s up to him to do it.”
Paz died in 1998 at the age of 84. He and Fuentes would never speak again.