Latin America: Michael McCaughan's book is fired by a personal passion and obsession to narrate the life of the Argentinian writer of Irish descent, Rodolfo Walsh that, in the author's view, ought not to be consigned to oblivion, writes Ciaran Cosgrove.
True Crimes: Rodolfo Walsh - The Life and Times of a Radical Intellectual. By Michael McCaughan. Latin America Bureau, 323pp. £10.99
A salient difference between perceptions about the writer's functions in the so-called "Developed World", in contradistinction to the writer's functions in the so-called "Third World" needs to be articulated here. In the former, the creative writer perceives clear demarcation lines between literary discourse and purpose, on the one hand, and journalistic discourse, on the other. In much Latin American writing and, I believe, Asian and African writing, there is often an erasure of boundaries. The case of continental Europe is different yet again. But in the culture of the English-speaking world, the poet or the novelist inhabits a relatively privatised domain with occasional sorties into the public arena. Indeed, for a creative writer to engage with matters such as "war with Iraq" or the "Palestinian question" would be to step down in an unseemly way from a higher calling, in order to attend to the iniquitous cuts and thrusts of ordinary life. If engagement with these matters has to be done, or so this view of the writer might have it, let it be done by oddball intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Edward Said.
The Argentinian writer of Irish descent, Rodolfo Walsh (1927-1977), certainly knew how to straddle categories. A short story writer of some genius, a journalist, a translator, and finally a militant activist for a revolutionary organisation, the Montoneros, itself the product of half a century of military violence and corruption in Argentina, Walsh was in truth a multifaceted individual. His violent end - he died in a shoot-out with the military - demonstrated that he was a marked man who appears to have been feared as much for the power of his pen as for his political activism. His own death was a reprise of the violent death of his daughter, Vicki, months earlier, the description of which, in the book under review, reminds me of nothing so much as that most memorable stake-out and ambush in Pontecorvo's classic film, The Battle of Algiers.
Argentina in the 1970s was, as we know now, a violent country where the armed forces terrorised large sections of the population. Thousands of people were killed. The astonishing admission made years later by a retired Argentinian naval officer that he had supervised the tossing from helicopters of the drugged bodies of dissidents into the River Plate appears to be the stuff of fiction. But, as the title of the book under review makes clear, they were "true crimes". One of the remarkable linguistic legacies bequeathed by the Argentinian military establishment of the 1970s, and one recognised now by the Oxford English Dictionary, is the conversion of the intransitive "disappear" into a transitive verb.
Michael McCaughan's book is fired by a personal passion and obsession to narrate a life that, in the author's view, ought not to be consigned to oblivion. McCaughan is aware that Walsh does not have the literary stature or renown of his compatriots Borges and Sábato, and he wishes to carve out a special place for him. Indeed, he rails against these better known writers for their supposed complicity in establishment corruption and obfuscation.
There is a gutsy vivacity in McCaughan's writing. He has the journalist's gift of ferreting out information and interviewing his sources with productive results, though we have to take him at his word when he quotes verbatim from his many one-to-one encounters. The book also contains a useful bibliography.
McCaughan charts the details of Walsh's often miserable early life, from his horrendous experiences in a boarding-school run by Irish priests in Buenos Aires, to his middle years spent in Cuba, through to his politicised final years back in Argentina. The chapter on Cuba is particularly revealing. Working for the press agency of the revolution, Prensa Latina, Walsh was able, as a skilled cryptographer, to decipher coded messages as they issued from a telex machine. These messages gave first indication of a CIA plan to train Cuban exiles in Guatemala for the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961, the infamous Bay of Pigs fiasco. The information was passed on to the Cuban government, which was able to forestall the whole exercise.
An important feature of McCaughan's book is the incorporation in translation of several of Walsh's own writings: letters, statements, short stories. These are scattered through the book, and give us a first-hand flavour of the kind of writer Walsh was. The highlight of these interpolations is the "Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta" written in 1977 shortly before Walsh's own death. In its searing truth-telling, it has all the characteristics of what Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano believed typified Walsh's writing - an "implacable lucidity" and an "ability to capture beauty" in the midst of darkness. The letter ends with Walsh's declared aim to "bear witness in difficult times".
If the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer is right when she comments that "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting", then Rodolfo Walsh comes across in Michael McCaughan's book as an exemplar of just such a struggle.
Ciaran Cosgrove is senior lecturer in Spanish at Trinity College, Dublin