On Friday, Nov. 14, I will be venturing into the wilds of New Jersey for a reading of my novel, Shadow of the Fathers, at the Raconteur bookstore in Metuchen. Actually, Metuchen, which is close to New Brunswick, home of Rutgers University’s main campus, is about a 45-minute train ride from Penn Station. For those New Yorkers who can’t make the trek, I will also be having a reading-signing at Cemi Underground, a relatively new bookstore that carries books generally of Latino and especially of Puerto Rican interest. That reading is set for Saturday, Nov. 15, at 5 p.m. Cemi is located in the heart of El Barrio, at 112th Street and Lexington Avenue.
For those who don’t know, Shadow was inspired by a real-life incident that took place in Puerto Rico in the 1930s. Dr. Cornelius “Dusty” Rhoads, who was sent to Puerto Rico by the Rockefeller Foundation to research pernicious anemia, a prevalent disease on the island at the time, wrote a letter meant for a friend that he had purposely killed eight of his patients and injected cancer into others, his way of helping eliminate the “degenerate” population there. At my previous readings both in Puerto Rico and New York, I’ve been surprised how relatively few people know about the events. Although the novel uses the incident as a takeoff point to get into other things, I give a rundown at the reading of the Rhoads affair, which seems to astonish the listeners.
In the novel, I updated the incident to the 1950s. One critic in the Puerto Rican newspaper Claridad said that by changing the date, I “distorted” island history. But I believe I stayed true to the spirit of the incident and to those involved. Searching into souls rather than reciting facts makes a novel worth reading. In this case, I made the change in order to explore the way of the world from the time the U.S. became a world power, in the hope of saying something worthwhile about the incredibly ambivalent U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship, and about the nature of colonialism—from Vietnam to Vieques—and of the Cold War, and how the personal and the political interconnect, and about art and life and all those things that good novels are supposed to be about.
But let’s face it, most novelists really are the last to know what their books are about and what value, if any, they have for the reader. I was a journalist before I was a novelist. Journalism allowed me to see, to a degree, what makes the world around me tick. Fiction writing allows me to use my imagination to try to make that intuitive leap into the heart of whatever matter I’m writing about.
The event at Raconteur is a twofer. Also appearing that night will be Kal Wagenheim, author of two terrific books on baseball icons Babe Ruth and Roberto Clemente, editor of The Puerto Ricans: A Documentary History, and correspondent for the New York Times when he lived in Puerto Rico. Kal will be reading from a recently re-released book of short stories by Puerto Rican authors that he translated into English. Called Cuentos, the collection features the work in both the original Spanish and in English of such island authors as Pedro Juan Soto, Emilio Belaval, Abelardo Diaz Alfaro, Rene Marques, Jose Luis Gonzalez and Emilio Diaz Valcarcel. Regrettably, only one of those masterful writers, Diaz Valcarcel, is still with us. But their stories still pulse with life.
When I was writing for the late, lamented (certainly by me) San Juan Star, I reviewed the bilingual book when it was first published by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. (Its current publisher is Marcus Wiener of Princeton, NJ). Among other things, I noted, in two very long sentences, that: “I’m still from that old school that believes if you want to truly understand a society, its true aspirations and anxieties, its ideas and illusions, what makes each one of its people individual and alone though bound together in the collective fate of the human race, the deepest comprehension will come neither from the calculated cant of political voices nor the easy analysis of journalists—not even from the scholarly, measured words of historians and social scientists—but from that society’s real spokespersons: its creative writers. If we want to know what 19th Century London was really like we read Dickens; no history books have delved into the heart of the American South as the novels of William Faulkner; one surrealistic sentence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez gives more insight into the aberration that seems to be so much a part of Latin American history than any weighty tome on the subject.”
I added in the 1978 review: “I’d be willing to bet pesos to pasteles that the deep-down, soul-searching truths about Puerto Ricans in our time are going to come—if they have not already arrived—not so much from the pens of people who write for a living as from the pens of those who live to write.”
Thirty years later, as literate readers and writers appear to be diminishing, the bet still stands.
by Robert Friedman 