Normally, we at Ninth
Letter love to use this blog as a way to announce the continuing successes
of the writers who have been published in our magazine. It’s a way to celebrate writers we admire,
and a way of keeping in touch, too.
Now, however, we are faced with the sad task of saying
goodbye to Oscar Hijuelos, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. In our sixth issue (v. 3 #2, Winter 2006) we
published an excerpt from Oscar’s novel-in-progress, Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise, accompanied by an interview with
him about that excerpt. Sadly, Oscar
wasn’t able to complete the novel before his sudden death on October 12, 2013.
In the excerpt, the journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley
(who was indeed a friend of Twain’s), says that, “if there is such a thing as
ghosts, literature will be the only verifiable version of them.” In the interview, Oscar elaborated on this
intriguing idea:
“Its source is a kind of tautology that has to do with the
sense that even as I am writing these words now, someone will be reading them,
perhaps (well, not in my case, but say someone like Twain), a hundred years
from now. But when I assume that what I
am writing now will be preserved in a book (or a journal) I always get the
image of some library stack—could be two hundred years from now—and of a
student or librarian reading this over and thinking, So that’s what it was like
back then. And I guess it’s informed by
my feeling that literature is a way of preserving voices from the past: I mean,
even as I tried to imagine what Twain might think or say in a given situation,
I not only thought that his books contained his spirit, but I also had the odd
sensation that he was somewhere nearby, sort of like a ghost. And I think that he must have surely been
aware of it himself while reading his favorites, like Carlyle’s history of the
French Revolution. (It was the book he had by his deathbed.)
“That I have Stanley saying this has to do with his own
passions—he read everything—junk novels, Greek and Latin works in the original,
countless kinds of books, as well as all current literature, from Tolstoy to
Twain, as if reading was an absolutely necessary part of existence, as
essential as breathing. By then, the
1890s, photographs and primitive film making were also preserving images of
human life, but I guess the line just conveys my own feeling that nothing will
ever quite capture the human inner voice and spirit the way that books do.”
You can hear something of Oscar Hijuelos’ spirit in this
interview, and even more so of course in his critically acclaimed novels, which
are now the afterlife he imagined, the place where his very human inner voice
can best be found.
