Cabrera Infante, Guillermo 1920–2005

(G. Cabrera Infante, G. Cain, Guillermo Cain)

PERSONAL: Born April 22, 1929, in Gibara, Cuba; immigrated to London, England, 1966; naturalized British citizen; died of septicemia on February 21, 2005, in London, England; son of Guillermo Cabrera Lopez (a journalist) and Zoila Infante; married Marta Calvo, August 18, 1953 (divorced, October, 1961); married Miriam Gomez, December 9, 1961; children: (first marriage) Ana, Carola. Ethnicity: Hispanic Education: Graduated from University of Havana, Cuba, 1956. Politics: "Reactionary on the left." Religion: Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Birdwatching, old movies.

CAREER: Writer. School of Journalism, Havana, Cuba, professor of English literature, 1960–61; Government of Cuba, Cuban embassy, Brussels, Belgium, cultural at-taché, 1962–64, charge d'affairs, 1964–65; scriptwriter for Twentieth Century-Fox and Cupid Productions, 1967–72. Visiting professor, University of Virginia, spring, 1982.

AWARDS, HONORS: Así en paz como en la guerra was nominated for Prix International de Literature (France), 1962; unpublished manuscript version of Tres tristes tigres won Biblioteca Breve Prize (Spain), 1964, and was nominated for Prix Formentor—International Publishers Prize, 1965; Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing, 1970; Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (France), 1971, for Tres tristes tigres; Cervantes Prize, 1997.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

Así en la paz como en la guerra: cuentos (title means "In Peace as in War: Stories"), Revolución (Havana, Cuba), 1960, translation by John Brooke-smith, Peggy Boyers, and Cabrera Infante published as Writes of Passage, Faber and Faber (Boston, MA), 1993.

Vista del amanacer en el trópico, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1965, translation by Suzanne Jill Levine published as A View of Dawn in the Tropics, Harper (New York, NY), 1978.

Tres tristes tigres, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1967, translation by Donald Gardner, Suzanne Jill Levine, and the author published as Three Trapped Tigers, Harper (New York, NY), 1971.

La Habana para un infante difunto, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1979, translation by Suzanne Jill Levine and the author published as Infante's Inferno, Harper (New York, NY), 1984.

Vidas para leerlas, Santillana (Madrid, Spain), 1998.

FILM CRITICISM

(Under pseudonym G. Cain) Un oficio del siglo veinte (film reviews; originally published in Carteles; also see below), Revolución, 1963, translation by Kenneth Hall and Cabrera Infante published as A Twentieth-Century Job, Faber, 1991.

Arcadia todas las noches (title means "Arcadia Every Night"), Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1978.

Cine o sardina, Santillana (Madrid, Spain), 1997.

OTHER

(Editor) Mensajes de libertad: La España rebelde—Ensayos selectos, Movimiento Universitario Revolucionario (Lima, Peru), 1961.

Vanishing Point (screenplay), Twentieth Century-Fox, 1970.

(Translator into Spanish) James Joyce, Dublineses (Dubliners), Lumen (Barcelona, Spain), 1972.

O (essays), Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1975.

Exorcismos del esti(l)o (title means "Summer Exorcisms" and "Exorcising Style"; English, French, and Spanish text), Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1976.

Cuban Writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante Reading from His Work (sound recording; recorded February 26, 1982, for the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape), Library of Congress (Washington, DC), 1982.

Holy Smoke (nonfiction; English text), Harper (New York, NY), 1985.

(Author of introduction) Virgilio Pianera, Cold Tales, translation by Mark Schafer, revised by Thomas Christensen, Eridanos Press (New York, NY), 1988.

(With others) Diablesas y diosas: 14 perversas para 15 autores, Editorial Laertes (Barcelona, Spain), 1990.

Mea Cuba (collection of writings on Cuba), Plaza & Janes (Barcelona, Spain), 1992, translation by Kenneth Hall and the author published as Mea Cuba, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1994.

(Author of prologue) La fiesta innombrable: trece poetas cubanos, Ediciones el Tucan de Virginia (Mexico, DF), 1992.

Vaya papaya!: Ramon Alejandro (exhibition catalog), Le Polygraphe (Paris, France), 1992.

(Author of prologue) Jose Luis Guarner, Autoretrato del cronista, Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1994.

Delito por bailar el chachacha, Santillana (Madrid, Spain), 1995, translation by the author published as Guilty of Dancing the Chachacha, Welcome Rain (New York, NY), 2001.

(Contributor) The Borges Tradition, Constable (London, England), 1995.

Mi musica extremada, Espasa Calpe (Madrid, Spain), 1996.

Ella cantaba boleros, Santillana (Madrid, Spain), 1996.

(Author of prologue) Augusto M. Torres, Diccionario Espasa cine, Espasa (Madrid, Spain), 1996.

(Author of text) Claudio Edinger, Alt-Havana, Alfaguaa (Madrid, Spain), 1999.

Infanteria (compilation), Fondo de Cultura Economic [Mexico], 1999.

Also author of screenplay, Wonderwall, 1968, and of unfilmed screenplay, Under the Volcano, based on Malcolm Lowry's novel of the same title. Also translator of stories by Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett, J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, and others. Work is represented in many anthologies. Contributor to periodicals, including New Yorker, New Republic, El País (Spain), and Plural (Mexico). Carteles (Cuban magazine), film reviewer under pseudonym G. Cain, 1954–60, fiction editor, 1957–60; editor of Lunes (weekly literary supplement of Cuban newspaper, Revolución), 1959–61.

SIDELIGHTS: Talking about his award-winning first novel Tres tristes tigres, translated as Three Trapped Tigers, Cuban-born writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante told Rita Guibert in Seven Voices: "I would prefer everyone to consider the book solely as a joke lasting about five hundred pages. Latin American literature errs on the side of excessive seriousness, sometimes solemnity. It is like a mask of solemn words, which writers and readers put up with by mutual consent."

As Alastair Reed pointed out in the New York Review of Books, Cabrera Infante is a contemporary of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro; his parents were founding members of the Cuban Communist Party. Following Castro's rise to power, Cabrera Infante was appointed editor of Lunes de Revolución, the literary supplement to the new regime's mouthpiece, Revolución. In this role, he also provided support to his brother's development of a documentary on nightlife in Havana. The documentary was subsequently banned by authorities as counterrevolutionary. Cabrera Infante protested the banning via Lunes but was rebuked publicly on his "duties to the Revolution" by Castro in a trial, and Lunes was closed down. Noted Reid, "Cabrera Infante found himself in the kind of limbo many Cuban writers of his generation were to inhabit in succeeding years, forbidden to publish. 'Within the Revolution, everything! Against the Revolution, nothing!' as Fidel 'thundered like a thousand Zeuses.'" He was assigned to Brussels as a cultural attaché and returned to Cuba for his mother's funeral in 1965, but faced "the precariousness of any continuing Cuban existence under an imposed silence … he accepted the inevitability of exile," concludes Reid. He was expelled from the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba as a traitor in 1968, following the publishing of Three Trapped Tigers, and began to write and speak publicly on Cuba.

In Three Trapped Tigers, we hear the voices of a group of friends as they take part in the nightlife of pre-Castro Havana. The friends take turns narrating the story using the colloquial speech of the lower-class inhabitants of that city. Told from many perspectives and using the language of a small group, the narrative is not always easy to follow. Elias L. Rivers explained in Modern Language Notes: "While some passages are readily accessible to any reader, others are obscured by Cuban vernaculars in phonetic transcription and by word-plays and allusions of many different kinds. A multiplicity of 'voices' engage in narrative, dialogue and soliloquy. [The novel] is a test which fascinates as it eludes and frustrates; the over-all narrative sense is by no-means obvious."

The importance of spoken language in Three Trapped Tigers is apparent even in the book's title, which in its English version repeats only the alliteration found in the Spanish title and not the title's actual meaning. Inside the book, the emphasis on sound continues as the characters pun relentlessly. There are so many puns in the book that New Republic contributor Gregory Rabassa maintained that in it Cabrera Infante "established himself as the punmaster of Spanish-American literature." Appearing most often are literary puns, including such examples as "Shame's Choice" used to refer to James Joyce, "Scotch Fizzgerald" for Scott Fitzgerald and "Somersault Mom" for Somerset Maugham. In another example, a bongo player—a member of the group of friends whose exploits are followed in the novel—is called "Vincent Bon Gogh."

If the emphasis on spoken rather than written language makes complete understanding of the novel difficult, it has made translating nearly impossible. Comparison of the Spanish, English, and French editions of the book proves that readers of each language are not reading the same text. "What Cabrera [Infante] has really done," commented Roger Sale in the New York Review of Books, "is to write, presumably with the help of his translators, three similar but different novels." Because of the word play, Sale continues, "quite obviously no translation can work if it attempts word-for-word equivalents."

Playing with words is also an important part of Cabrera Infante's next novel, Infante's Inferno, and his nonfic-tion work, Holy Smoke. The latter—Cabrera Infante's first book written originally in English—tells the history of the cigar and describes famous smoking scenes from literature and film. Unlike the nearly universal acclaim received for Three Trapped Tigers, critics were unable to reach a consensus on these two works. While some praised Cabrera Infante's continued use of puns as innovative, other had grown tired of the Cuban's verbal contortions.

Commenting on Infante's Inferno in the New York Review of Books Michael Wood complained that Cabrera Infante's relentless punning "unrepentedly mangles language and hops from one tongue to another like a frog released from the throat." Some of the jokes are "terrible," Wood wrote; "others are so cumbersome, so fiendishly worked for, that the noise of grinding machinery deafens all the chance of laughter." New York Review of Books contributor Josh Rubins had similar problems with Holy Smoke. He comments, "In Holy Smoke … the surfeit of puns seems to arise not from mania …, but from mere tic. Or, worse yet, from a computer program."

Other reviewers were not so harsh in their criticism. In Enrique Fernandez's Voice Literary Supplement review of Infante's Inferno, for example, the critic observed that the novel is written in "an everyday Cuban voice, unaffected, untrammeled [and], authentic." John Gross of the New York Times hailed Cabrera Infante as a master in the use of language. Commenting on Holy Smoke, he claimed: "Conrad and Nabokov apart, no other writer for whom English is a second language can ever have used it with more virtuosity. He is a master of idiomatic echoes and glancing allusions; he keeps up a constant barrage of wordplay, which is often outrageous, but no more outrageous than he intends it to be."

Cabrera Infante's Mea Cuba is a collection of his writings on Cuba produced after he left the country. Given the nature of his departure, Mea Cuba "as opposed to its gleeful predecessors … is in a sense a reluctant book, one that he would hardly have chosen to write had it not more or less accrued through time," said Reid. Critics, while recognizing the inherent value of the work, were mixed in their reactions. "For all its essential rectifications, Mea Cuba is so overstated, so patently inflamed by spite and thwarted ambition, that it forfeits its place in the rational, non-polarised debate about Cuba that is needed at this time," declared Lorna Scott Fox in the London Review of Books. Alma Guill-ermoprieto, writing in the New York Times Book Review, concluded, "Despite the dazzling writing … the style sometimes overwhelms the chronicle, and one finds oneself wishing for a respite from the shrill delivery and the endless petty settling of accounts…. At his worst, the bombastic punster's salvos are not meaningful but mean. At his best, he provides a moving chronicle of love and despair for the country he lost to Castro." World Literature Today critic Will H. Corral found academic significance as well as entertainment in Cabrera Infante's writings, noting "his texts read as the ideal format for what is bandied about the United States as cultural studies. Despite one's differences with his politics, Cabrera Infante's knowledge of Cuban literariness is the broadest, liveliest, and nastiest to date."

In a 1998 essay for Nation, Mario Vargas Llosa recalled that Cabrera Infante's lively sense of humor was not limited to the written page. Vargas Llosa, a prize jury member, had "fought like a lion" to ensure that Tres tristes tigres would win the Biblioteca Breve prize. Not long after that, Vargas Llosa received an incensed phone call from a man who demanded to know how the literary honor could be bestowed on "that repellent man Cabrera Infante." Vargas Llosa hastily defended his decision to the caller. Of course, the complainer turned out to be Cabrera Infante, who later signed a copy of his latest book for his duped friend, Vargas Llosa.

Vargas Llosa went on to compare Cabrera Infante to the great English-language wordsmiths: Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and Laurence Sterne. But the Cuban's style is "unmistakably his own, with a sensoriality and eurythmy that, at times, … he persists in calling 'Cuban.' As if literary styles had a nationality!"

The author takes his humor seriously, suggested Vargas Llosa. "For the sake of a joke, a parody, a pun, an acrobatic stunt of wit, a verbal ricochet, Cabrera Infante has always been prepared to make all the enemies on earth, to lose his friends and perhaps his life," he said, referring to the political struggles the author has faced. "Because for him," the essayist continued, "humor is not as it is for common mortals, a mere recreation of the spirit, a diversion that relaxes the mind, but rather a compulsive way of challenging the world as it is, of undercutting its certainties and the rationale that holds it up—bringing to light the infinite possibilities for whimsy, surprise and nonsense concealed in it."

Cabrera Infante's wit was on display again in Guilty of Dancing the Chachacha, which was translated by the author from his Spanish-language original. The three interrelated stories feature the same man and woman, having lunch in a Havana restaurant during a rainy Friday afternoon. The couple's relationship with one another and their country are revealed through the three scenarios, each of which ends with the woman walking out. A Publishers Weekly critic found that the author's "diverting premise is squandered" in part by the male character's tendency toward racist, sexist and homophobic remarks. "By the end of the book," added the reviewer, "his relentless puns become tedious." Lawrence Olszewski of L ibrary Journal likewise felt that this work is "not up to par with [the author's] masterpieces," Three Trapped Tigers and Infante's Inferno. But Booklist's Brad Hooper thought Cabrera Infante proved "ingenious in exploiting the short-story form" in this work.

Three Trapped Tigers established Cabrera Infante's reputation as a writer of innovative fiction, a reputation that some critics find justified by his later work. Cabrera Infante once described his literary beginnings to CA: "It all began with parody. If it were not for a parody I wrote on a Latin American writer who was later to win the Nobel Prize, I wouldn't have become a professional writer and I wouldn't qualify to be here at all. My parents wanted me to go to University and I would have liked to become a doctor. But somehow that dreadful novel crossed my path. After reading a few pages (I just couldn't stomach it all, of course) and being only seventeen at the time, I said to myself, 'Why, if that's what writing is all about—anch'io sono scrittore [I am also a writer]!' To prove I too was a writer I wrote a parody of the pages I had read. It was a dreadfully serious parody and unfortunately the short story I wrote was taken by what was then the most widely read publication in Latin America, the Cuban magazine, Bohemia. They paid me what at the time I considered a fortune and I was hooked: probably hooked by fortune, probably hooked by fame but certainly hooked by writing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Alvarez-Borland, Isabel, Discontinuidad y ruptura en Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Hispanamerica, 1982.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5, 1976, Volume 25, 1983, Volume 45, 1987, Volume 120, 1999.

Diaz Ruiz, Ignacio, Cabrera Infante y otros escritores latinoamericanos, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (Mexico), 1992.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 113: Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers, First Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Feal, Rosemary Geisdorfer, Novel Lives: The Fictional Autobiographies of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Mario Vargas Llosa, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1986.

Gallagher, David Patrick, Modern Latin-American Literature, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1973.

Gil Lopez, Ernesto, Guillermo Cabrera Infante: La Habana, el lenguaje y la cineatografia, ACT, Cabildo Insular de Tenerife (Tenerife, Spain), 1991.

Guibert, Rita, Seven Voices, Knopf (New York, NY), 1973.

Hernandez-Lima, Dinorah, Versiones y re-versiones his-toricas en la obra de Cabrera Infante, Pliegos (Madrid, Spain), 1990.

Jimenez, Reynaldo L., Guillermo Cabrera Infante y Tres tristes tigres, Ediciones Universal (Miami, FL), 1976.

Machover, Jacobo, El heraldo de las malas noticias: Guillermo Cabrera Infante: ensayo a dos voces, Ediciones Universal, 1996.[Alana No place here]

Merrim, Stephanie, Logos and the Word: The Novel of Language and Linguistic Motivation in "Grande Sertao: Veredas" and "Tres tristes tigres," [New York, NY], 1983.

Nelson, Ardis L., Cabrera Infante in the Menippean Tradition, with prologue by Cabrera Infante, Juan de la Cuesta (Newark, DE), 1983.

Ortega, Julio, and others, Guillermo Cabera Infante [Madrid, Spain], 1974.

Pereda, Rosa Maria, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edaf, D.L. (Madrid, Spain), 1979.

Souza, Raymond D., Major Cuban Novelists: Innovation and Tradition, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1976.

Souza, Raymond D., Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1996.

Tittler, Jonathan, Narrative Irony in the Contemporary Spanish-American Novel, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1984.

Volek, Emil, Cuatro claves para la modernidad: Aleixandre, Borges, Carpentier, Cabrera Infante, Gredos (Madrid, Spain), 1984.

PERIODICALS

Americas, July-August, 1995, p. 24.

Antioch Review, fall, 1995, Adan Quan, review of Mea Cuba, pp. 494-495.

Booklist, November 1, 1994, p. 475; May 1, 1999, review of Cine o sardina, p. 1583; July, 2001, Brad Hooper, review of Guilty of Dancing the Chachacha, p. 1977.

Book World, October 3, 1971.

Commonweal, November 12, 1971.

Hispania, May-September, 1993, William Siemens, "Mirrors and Metamorphosis: Lewis Carroll's Presence in Tres tristes tigres," pp. 297-303; March, 1985, Isabel Alvarez-Borland, "La Habana para un infante difunto: Cabrera Infante's Self Conscious Narrative," pp. 44-48.

Ideologies and Literature, January-March, 1981, M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski, "Tres tristes tigres, or the Treacherous Play on Carnival," pp. 33-56.

Latin American Literary Review, spring/summer, 1976, Kjelal Kadir, "Stalking the Oxen of the Sun and Felling the Sacred Cows," pp. 15-22; fall/winter, 1976, Claudia Cairo Resnik, "The Use of Jokes in Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres," pp. 14-21; fall/ winter, 1977, Phyllis Mitchell, "The Reel against the Real: Cinema in the Novels of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Manuel Puig, pp. 22-29; spring/summer, 1980, Stephanie Merrim, "A Secret Idiom: The Grammar and Role of Language in Tres tristes tigres," pp. 96-117; July-December, 1985, Lydia Hazera, "Strategies for Reader Participation in the Works of Cortazar, Cabera Infante, and Vargas Llosa," pp. 25-28.

Library Journal, November 1, 1994, p. 93; September 1, 1998, review of Infante's Inferno and Three Trapped Tigers, p. 224; July, 2001, Lawrence Olszewski, review of Guilty of Dancing the Chachacha, p. 127.

London Review of Books, October 4-17, 1984; February 6, 1986; December 8, 1988, Philip Horne, "Wasps and All," p. 22; November 24, 1994, Lorna Scott Fox, "Castration," p. 22.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 6, 1984; November 27, 1994, Richard Eder, review of Mea Cuba, p. 11; September 30, 2001, Susan Salter Reynolds, review of Guilty of Dancing the Chachacha, p. 11.

Modern Language Notes, March, 1977.

Nation, November 4, 1978; January 4, 1993, Gilberto Perez, "It's a Wonderful Life," pp. 24-28; May 11, 1998, Mario Vargas Llosa, "Touchstone," p. 56.

New Republic, July 9, 1984.

Newsweek, October 25, 1971.

New Yorker, September 19, 1977.

New York Review of Books, December 16, 1971; June 28, 1984; May 8, 1986; February 2, 1995, Alastair Reed, review of Mea Cuba, pp. 14-16.

New York Times, December 9, 2001, Charles Wilson, "Havana Moon."

New York Times Book Review, October 17, 1971; May 6, 1984; March 2, 1986.

Observer (London), September 2, 1984; October 13, 1985; December 21, 1986; November 27, 1994, Alma Guillermoprieto, review of Mea Cuba, p. 9.

Paris Review, spring, 1983.

Publishers Weekly, June 15, 1998, review of Infante's Inferno and Three Trapped Tigers, p. 44; July 9, 2001, review of Guilty of Dancing the Chachacha, p. 45.

Review, January 10, 1972.

Salamagundi, fall, 1993, Regina James, "Speaking with Authority," pp. 86-96.

Substance, Volume 13, number 1, 1984, Suzanne Jill Levine, "Translating Infante's Inferno," pp. 85-94.

Time, January 10, 1972.

Times Literary Supplement, April 18, 1968; October 12, 1984; August 26, 1986; January 20, 1989, Nicholas Rankin, review of View of Dawn in the Tropics, p. 54; March 6, 1992, John King, review of A Twentieth-Century Job, p. 17; October 22, 1993, Will Eaves, review of Writes of Passage, p. 22; December 30, 1994, David Gallagher, review of Mea Cuba, p. 7; August 14, 1998, review of Cine o sardina, p. 20.

Village Voice, March 25, 1986.

Voice Literary Supplement, April 18, 1968; October 12, 1984; August 29, 1986.

Washington Post Book World, January 28, 1979; May 27, 1984; June 7, 1998, review of Infante's Inferno and Three Trapped Tigers, p. 12.

World Literature Today, spring, 1977; autumn, 1978, Ardis Nelson, "Holy Smoke: Anatomy of a Vice," pp. 590-593; summer, 1981; autumn, 1987, Mary Davis, "The Minds' Isle: An Introduction to Cabrera Infante," p. 512, Jose Miguel Oviedo, "Nabokov/Cabrera Infante: True Imaginary Lies," pp. 559-567; spring, 1993, Will Corral, review of Mea Cuba, pp. 342-343; autumn, 1996, Cesar Ferreira, review of Delito por bailar el chachacha, pp. 921-922.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, February 23, 2005, section 3, p. 9.

Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2005, p. B7.

New York Times, February 23, 2005, p. C19.

Times (London, England), February 23, 2005, p. 62.

Washington Post, February 25, 2005, p. B7.