Thursday, March 10, 2011
Ocampo and Drieu La Rochelle, when love is too smart
Steno Solinas
The correspondence, which lasted fifteen years, between Ocampo and Drieu La Rochelle there are two worlds, two cultures, two characters. So the feeling was something that tied them more and less than a passion.
year in which they met, 1928, Victoria Ocampo was a rich and beautiful Argentina not yet forty years old, married, but in fact a separate and unique love behind, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle thirty-five without a brilliant job, and already the second failed marriage, with many romances behind him. What pushed into each other's arms and back is not easy to say, Victoria was looking for writers in men, although still as understanding of souls rather than bodies, how to Drieu, his attraction was the daughter of prevention , the charm of an intelligent woman, which is a contradiction in his eyes, if not an unnatural element.
As it is, they were lovers, they remained friends, he wrote, traveled together, argue too hard, but without this incidesse on mutual esteem and affection. The Ocampo was the only woman to whom La Rochelle he wrote in a sealed envelope, the reasons for his suicide, and the long time that she survived that memory intellectual and sentimental never wavered, remaining true to who he was, however, was defeated by politics and history. Now the publishing house Archinto public, edited by Julien Hervier, Loving you was not a mistake (pp. 218, € 17, translated by Henry Badellino), the correspondence exchanged between them from '29 to '44, and it is a special light to illuminate the two figures and an era, that between the wars, so dramatic.
But who really was Victoria Ocampo, beyond the echo of a name that today, except for some specialists, evokes pale literary acquaintances between the two sides of the Atlantic, the name of a journal, Sur, and a collaborator exceptional, Borges?
The eldest of six children, Victoria belonged to one of the oldest and wealthiest families of the aristocracy bairense. Among his ancestors were a page of Isabella of Castile, a governor of Peru, a candidate for President of the Republic of Argentina. Among his relatives writer Jose Fernandez, the author of Martin Fierro, the epic of a nation. Its modern house on the Mar del Plata had been modeled on Gropius, one of Buenos Aires according to the dictates of the architect Alberto Presbich, a student of Le Corbusier. Immense riches, then, in the service of education purely European idea of \u200b\u200bthe appendix and set un'Argentina outpost of the Old Continent that Drieu, obsessed by the decadence of the latter will speedily reproach: "You told me that 'Argentina was full of life, strength, and so on. No, I do not I have found that your life as a woman and a depth that there is unrest in Paris in its gutters. There is strength in the people of Argentina, as in all people, but this force is imprisoned by the pattern formed by La Nacion, the "Company", by the intellectual circles and Sur, and you do not need an organic cause, but that of literature in general '.
For a young quell'Argentina first well of 900, where married women have the legal status of a minor and is subject to the authority of the husband, the road is apparently required: a wedding at the level of wealth, a life of leisure, luxury, travel, care and education of children. But if Ocampo married at twenty-two, in 1912, with Luis Bernardo de Estrada knows that since a teenager, just a year after the union no longer works, he too jealous and brutal, "the monster sad" that considers the Women fillies to tame and ride horses, she has followed courses at the Sorbonne on Dante and Nietzsche, who went to the Collège de France to listen to the lessons of Bergson ... They will live under the same roof, but not in the same bed for about a decade later, in '26, the Argentine law allows married women to exercise a profession and to have their money, and Victoria, who has four years is still going to live alone has meanwhile started to be a literary name and has not denied the scandal, more or less stifled, a report by Julián Martínez, a rich playboy who enjoys diplomatic in his conquests Coco Chanel. It is still attached to him, even if love is now turned off and remained tenderness, when in the summer of '28 Drieu meets in Paris.
should be noted that Victoria has a passion for men of talent and fame, which may lend itself to the misunderstanding of some sort of collector of rich celebrities. It is a mistake that will make the German philosopher Hermann von Keyserling, is a mistake that will make the English philosopher Orytega y Gasset: both will exchange the enthusiasm, passion, love for what they say, write and think, for something that you rather not physical evidence. It is an age still largely misogynist, in which man is accustomed to be admired and is expected to give the woman without fuss. Hence, misunderstandings, exchanges of accusations, broken relationships.
With Drieu, however, take something else. Sure, it's misogynist too, and it is the highest degree, but in a different way from the brutality and the bottom vulgarity of those two illustrious thinkers: it is with tenderness and respect, almost apologetically. It is a gentle soul who understands just how behind the mask of the independent woman and at ease in every situation there is insecurity and misery of those forced to play a role, would let go, but education, the company prohibited it . Victoria has everything to Drieu like it, but all that Drieu detests. A house in the eighth arrondissement, Chanel dresses, paintings by Picasso, Léger, Miró on the wall, stays at the Savoy in London or the Normandy in Deauville, and in fact the idea of \u200b\u200bluxury, beautiful things, laziness and idleness he cultivates an almost maniacal precisely because it is within the reach of its assets. The idea of \u200b\u200bbeing maintained by 'female patrons "on the one hand it tickles the male pride, and other projects because it's repugnant to himself the shadow of a father vain, seductive and failed, unable to love and a source of suffering for his mother.
Even as a female type Drieu Victoria is the concentration of mixed feelings. Physically it is tall, well built, mature, and this accords with those who never fell in love with young girls in flower and not was never seen in the role of mentor-corrupter of young souls and caste. And, therefore, clashes with his preference for women anti-intellectual, straightforward, the only ones that he can not endure because it obliges us to think, why not invade her privacy. Victoria is "whatever you want to ignore him in the other sex," that element of culture that can shake his sense of superiority, which may force him to discuss, to review a position to question the goodness of a choice. It is in fact the charm that comes from a hazard, where the passion for women simple, if not for the prostitutes who are not even questions, under the banner of security. The first is the long stressful, the second in the long run is boring.
And Victoria? What is in Drieu Victoria? It is an intellectual, but not the bookish. It has a modern culture that makes the thermometer that France between the wars, unable to grasp the novelty of the avant-garde, but often their sterility. It is handsome, and his masochistic narcissism can not hide the physical courage and moral tension incapable of compromise. Compared to the average of his brothers, has more taste, cleanliness, charm, and this affects people like you in this respect has little to learn and much to teach ... Finally, in Drieu is a psychological game that is not denied, and this makes the exchange more attractive to a female mind ... How many women would like to save Victoria from its black side, pessimistic, melancholy, like many women think and hopefully give him the confidence in their own ability can lead to great things.
distance, differences in political opinions, the fatigue that creeps in every love relationship, the relationship loosen over time, but never cut flowers. In the 30s, a series of conferences organized by Ocampo in Argentina will be the opportunity for Drieu to focus on ideologies and choices of the field: "It was there that I realized that life in the Western world was coming out of its torpor and that was about to be torn by the dilemma fascism-communism. Since then, I walked quickly to the fall in a political destiny. " The sum of all this is, in 1943, The man on horseback, story of a Bolivian dictator who dreams of the unity of Latin America and the reconciliation of social classes. Camilla, the heroine of the novel, is actually Victoria Ocampo, and of course their love is doomed to failure. "It's about time you to understand that women are also human beings" he had complained one day ... Why Ocampo knew that "in its own way to love France recognize his way of loving women and I have often criticized and it was so irritating, but not petty. If Drieu is a policy that we do not like, not for shameful reasons, low or interested.
One day I said to him: Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church does not. But my tenderness remains true, incurably loyal. "
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