Lost and Found With Julio Cortázar

In late June 1963, Julio Cortázar’s kaleidoscopic novel “Hopscotch” was published in Argentina to some acclaim. About six months later, I was born in Brooklyn, New York, to considerably less fanfare. It would be another 25 years before the book and I crossed paths, and I had the maddening, ecstatic and puzzling experience of reading it. Last year, both “Hopscotch” and I turned 60.

I use the word puzzling here quite intentionally. Chief among the attributes of “Hopscotch” is the jigsaw game Cortázar builds into the experience with his “table of instructions” prefacing it, suggesting to the reader at least two orders in which to read the chapters: one linear (and truncated: it ends at Chapter 56, and advises leaving the remaining 99 chapters unread) and the other a proscribed order that blows up the numeric sequence of the entire work into a seemingly haphazard jumble that leaps back and forth until all 155 chapters are read. Traditional linear order is deconstructed, shaken and stirred even before the book begins. And the seeming disorder expressed in Cortázar’s instructions hints at a distinctly obscure logic of its own. But also, a mystery.

I am an editor by trade, not of fiction but of essays, and for the most part operate rationally, enforcing factual accuracy, clarity and logic for the benefit of a wide audience, and so typically don’t think about written works in these terms — for instance, casting around for meaning in a book’s birthdate as a fortune teller or astrologer might — but I began doing so last year, when after a quarter century of procrastination, I embarked on the writing of my own book, and found my old quasi-mystical romance with “Hopscotch” rekindled. Much to my surprise, Cortázar himself, who had died in 1984 in Paris, became an enigmatic but invaluable guide.

When we reread the books we loved when we were young years later we often find both the book and the reader changed. This was true of me, too. As a young man who had barely lived, I was transfixed by the Serpent Club, the wild and seemingly exotic cast of characters haunting the streets and apartments of Horacio Oliveira’s Paris. This time, some three decades later, it was not so much the content of the book, but its origins, the raucous and improvisational process of its creation, that made this reunion between me and Cortázar’s masterpiece so meaningful and sweet.

A few years after I graduated from Cornell University in 1985, I did what many insecure young people do: I created my very own existential crisis. I had decided to become a writer, and beneath my ambition lurked the terrifying possibility of failure. In particular, I feared that my failure to write a novel would destroy the identity I was building for myself. I would cease to exist. Over time, I navigated this crisis by simply living through it day by day, week by week. In that time, I wrote sporadically —short stories, poetry, reviews— and took various jobs.

Eventually, I found a role related to my youthful dream: an editorial assistant at The New York Times. Within a few years, I became an editor, a job I turned out to be good at. I found satisfaction in helping others with their writing, in guiding them in their work. In the process, I co-edited four handsome books anthologizing these essays. Technically, though, I was the author of none.

As I neared 60, the stubborn dream of being an author, which I thought I had extinguished, reignited. I began rising before dawn to write in my notebook and taking notes on my phone late into the night. I drafted a proposal for a non-fiction book that gained some support.

In October of last year, I took a four month leave from my job to write a book, a sort of memoir that would examine the collaborative relationship between writers and editors. It was my first break in service in 25 years at The Times, most as an opinion editor, where I created The Stone, a platform for philosophical essays and commentary that ran for more than a decade. I was determined not to waste this opportunity. I'd made preparations and plans—an outline and some 100 pages of research I'd gathered at the New York Public Library over several months. Now I was set to begin the task that I had spent nearly half my life helping others do: to write. As my friend and philosopher Simon Critchley advised me somewhere in the process, it was time to put the preparation aside and "just press play." Simple.

My excitement at this new opportunity was shot through with a current of anxiety. Let's call it the editor's identity crisis. Making the switch from editing, in which the base material for the work is delivered by another into your hands, to writing, in which you must perform the God-like act of creating a coherent world from the astral dust of your consciousness — this was a different beast. And the fear that I would fail to write after so many years of presuming to guide others in the same process persisted like a low-hum in the weeks and days leading up to my sabbatical. The old demon had returned.

I set a goal of writing 1,000 words a day. But I soon ran into a glitch. With the outline and the writing plan before me, I stumbled. It seemed that knowing beforehand what I was going to write took the wind out of me; I lost interest in writing it before I even got on to the page. I churned out some pages this way but they were dull. The words were not notes flowing out melodically but stones being pushed uphill. The drudgery of obligation, of intention, had weighed down the process, and the product, too. There was apparently a poet hiding beneath the editor who was now demanding spontaneity, curiosity, mystery.

And so, in the interest of simply getting writing done, each morning I put aside the outline, the chapter list, the plan and even the goal of writing a specific book about a specific subject, and just wrote.

This worked, and the results interested, even excited me. Without parameters, the writing flowed more naturally, letting the hand follow the mind as it woke in the morning and noticed small things like the temperature and quality of the air coming in through the window, the morning light gradually making itself known on the red brick face of the buildings across the courtyard. Rather than program my output, I allowed what the poet William Stafford called the "coherence of my self" to emerge, until something containing life or motion or light appeared on the page and called me to it.

During this time I kept certain books nearby, gathered around me as sustenance for the next day’s writing. And what ended up there surprised me. Seekers and religious mystics: St. Augustine’s Confessions, The Cloud of Unknowing, Abandonment to Divine Providence. Poets, both living and dead; works by Frank Bidart, James Schuyler, Anne Carson, Paul Blackburn, John Wieners and others scattered across the bed with my papers.

It would be a few weeks before “Hopscotch” found its way into the pile, but as I began to re-read the chapters in my own improvisatory fashion, I was increasingly drawn in; it seemed to speak most directly to my situation and soon it rose to the top of the pile, calling me to read it, not just as literature but as a sort of affirmation, a light by which my failure to write according to plan wasn’t a failure at all, but rather something to be transcended. I started to find messages in its cryptic fragments, letting it lead me down a path that I couldn’t otherwise see clearly.

In “Hopscotch,” Cortázar’s inclusion of notes, philosophical reflections and ephemera as chapters — especially the Morelliana, the musings ascribed to Morelli, Cortázar's novelistic or compositional phantom — forced me to consider writing not just as communication to others, which demands coherence and clarity, but as that which precedes it — communication with oneself, born in intuition, the primordial soup of creation, the sensations and impulses that move the author in the direction of expression. In one of the Morelliana chapters, 82, Cortázar captures this perfectly:

Why am I writing this? I have no clear ideas. I do not even have ideas. There are tugs, impulse, blocks, and everything is looking for a form, then rhythm comes into play and I write within that rhythm, I write by it, moved by it and not by that thing they call thought and turns out prose, literature or what have you. .. In that way by writing I go down into the volcano, I approach the Mothers, I connect with the Center — whatever it may be. Writing is sketching my mandala and at the same time going through it, inventing purification by purifying oneself; the task of a poor white shaman in nylon socks. 

Soon I went beyond the book and with the help of a translator, Alexia Trigo, began searching Cortázar’s own accounts, mainly in interviews, of the composition of “Hopscotch.”

And there I found not practical advice but something better — a sort of fellowship with a seeker, a mystic whose faith and total abandonment to exploration moved me, and encouraged me to free myself from the ambition I had for the ultimate success of my project and just get on with it.

In the course of this research I learned:

—That in writing “Hopscotch” Cortázar was pursuing a narrative motion that was not strictly "forward" or linear. Hence the broken pieces, arranged to create a whole. Cortázar himself referred to it as a mosaic.

—That he wrote “Hopscotch” not with a plan or a map but "an obligation of starting." An impulse.—That he was after in some sense an erasure of himself as the writer, seeking to allow the expression of the self before the self. In one interview he identifies this creature as a "pre-Adamite" version of himself, which I suppose means unformed, unmade and so unspoiled, all the better to make way for the spontaneous utterances being accessed in his wanderings. He says: "How does one write a novel when one must first unwrite oneself, unlearn oneself, begin anew, from scratch, in a pre-Adamite condition?" —That it was a work whose meaning would be discoverable only after it was done.

I found an exhilaration in these proclamations. In the liberation from direction and known purpose, from linear time, from the tyranny of measurement. In the willingness to enter into the state of uncertainty, of unknowing, without apology, an expression of an almost mystical faith.

The one who begins each day with his or her faith planted in the act of searching, the act that possesses inherent value, that justifies itself in the doing, that lifts the specter of success or failure and permits the experience of being alive and conscious to unfold in time organically.

I am not a scholar or a literary expert, but in my heart, I do not believe that Cortázar's aggressive destruction of some of literature's most cherished conventions was strictly a literary act but rather an attempt to validate or express a human condition, an undervalued and traditionally dismissed experience of life — fractured, incoherent, devoid of lessons, perhaps signifying nothing, yet still full of the root energy of consciousness, of being alive. The self as he knew it, as it came to him, as it felt and sounded. And maybe that was in fact what I was looking for when I put my life on pause for four months to try to write a book. To come to terms with how I experienced the world, whether or not I wrote the book. 

In one interview Cortázar said: "Each day I lose more confidence in myself, and I am happy …"

Not an evolution, but an undoing. This is not hopeful. And I have not succeeded. In taking Cortázar on as my writing companion and guide, rather than Strunk and White or Stephen King, I did something impractical. And I got the appropriate result: I did not write the book. But for all I know it may be sitting there buried in the 100,000 disparate words I produced with Cortázar’s help in those four months.

Poor white shaman in nylon socks.

And he carried me.