After the birth of his first child, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño foreswore writing poetry. Or so the legend has it. Poetry writing is a precarious and poorly paid line of work; its itinerant and depressed practitioners often live paycheck-to-paycheck between dirty alleyways in seedy parts of sprawling cities, bouncing between suicidal lovers and washing themselves beneath the rain that pours down on their long, contemplative walks. They write by streetlight at night, scrawling brilliant (if never-to-be-read) verses down on stained pages of stolen composite notebooks. They die ignominious and painful early deaths at the hands of venereal diseases, freak accidents, chronic illness and despair. They do not have children; if they do, the children grow up to become unhappy, maladjusted, sun-starved and slouch-spined tax evaders with little to no artistic talent of their own. Exceptions to these rules are few.
“Y en mi vida, que ha sido más bien nómade y de una pobreza extrema en ocasiones, leer ha contrapesado esa pobreza y ha sido mi soberanía y ha sido mi elegancia. Podía estar en cualquier situación y si leía a Horacio, por ejemplo, el dandy, el que estaba viviendo por encima de sus posibilidades era yo, siempre.”
“And in my life, which has been nomadic and marked at times by extreme poverty, reading has been a counterweight to the poverty and has been my sovereignty and my elegance. I could be in any situation and, if I read Horace, for example, the dandy, then I was the one living beyond my means.”
- Roberto Bolaño, “Entrevista con María Teresa Cárdenas y Erwin Díaz”
Bolaño appears to have understood this and opted to spare his children the grim fate. He looked into his infant son’s eyes (so the hagiographers tell us) and promised him that he would thereafter devote himself to the most lucrative profession he could think of: prose writing. The infant son, confused but appeased by the strange giant’s grunting noises, wailed in joy. Bolaño went on to write a series of novels and short stories that would earn him worldwide honor and acclaim and, most importantly, handsome financial compensation. Unfortunately, his decades-long flirtation with the vocation of poet had already taken its physiological toll. He would die, age 50, of prolonged liver failure, waiting for a transplant that never arrived. Fin.
The anecdote, like so many others in Bolaño’s biography, sounds apocryphal. It asks us to believe that Bolaño just decided (for banal, unpoetic, craven economic reasons) to abandon poetry and become an award-winning novelist, as if anyone just decides to become an award-winning novelist, rather than getting preordained for the job by God at the birth of the universe (along with the sculptors, painters, serial killers and other exceptional characters in human history). It compels us to accept the absurd idea that anyone would pursue any kind of career in creative writing for the financial prospects. And it invests his newborn son with eerie, history of world literature-changing powers. Would we have ever held Los detectives salvajes or Estrella distante between our hands if not for that dumb, screaming infant? Would we have slept with A la intemperie or Llamadas telefónicas by our bedsides?
“Probablemente no me lo crean, pero se duchaba con un libro. Lo juro. Leía en la ducha. ¿Que cómo lo sé? Es muy fácil. Casi todos sus libros estaban mojados.”
“You won't believe this, but he used to shower with a book. I swear. He read in the shower. How do I know? Easy. Almost all his books were wet.”
– Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes
Bolaño was a mediocre poet before he was a phenomenal prose writer. He was an unknown vagabond bouncing between continents, “haciendo la revolución” and publishing his scraps in friends’ anthologies, before he was a heavyweight on the international literary scene. He worked dead-end jobs, ate meals sporadically and wrote at the dead of night before he had the luxury of devoting himself full-time to the enviable job of being a well-paid, well-liked, well-read novelista-slash-cuentista-slash-cronista.
Bolaño didn’t become a literary legend by trying to convince himself of his own greatness. He became one by leaning into and mythologizing his own mediocracy. He wrote great prose in the 1990s about terrible poets in the 1970s. His protagonists are failures professionally and abominations morally (see: Juan García Madero, Carlos Wieder, Bolaño’s alter ego Arturo Belano). They contribute little to society besides the reams of poetry they expect no one to read. They have no philosophy beyond an insane, all-consuming love of literature that compels them to steal books and read constantly (even in the shower). They are, in many ways, complete losers.
But they aren’t just any losers. They’re Bolaño’s losers and he writes about them with a sympathy and affection so contagious that one can’t help but get seduced by the mediocre myth. Pursuing a poet’s life is a nasty, brutish and (thankfully, in most cases) short endeavor. But reading and writing about a poet’s life? That’s the stuff of legend.