University of Texas acquires Gabriel García Márquez’s archive

PanARMENIAN.Net - Gabriel García Márquez, who died in April at 87, was a strong critic of American imperialism who was banned from entry to the United States for decades, even after “One Hundred Years of Solitude” vaulted him to international celebrity and, in 1982, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

But now García Márquez, who was born in Colombia and lived much of his adult life in Mexico City, has “gone to Texas,” as they say, the New York Times reports.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin will announce on Monday, Nov 24, that it has acquired García Márquez’s archive, which contains manuscripts, notebooks, photo albums, correspondence and personal artifacts, including two Smith Corona typewriters and five Apple computers.

At the Ransom Center, one of the nation’s leading literary archives — and the only one “in the country’s borderlands with Latin America,” noted Steve Enniss, its director — García Márquez’s literary remains will be preserved alongside those of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges and other global figures.

“It’s almost as if James Joyce meets Gabriel García Márquez, whose influence on the 20th-century novel in some way mirrored his own,” Enniss said of the acquisition. “It’s very fitting that García Márquez is joining our collections. It’s hard to think of a novelist who has had as wide-ranging an impact.”

The archive, purchased from his family, includes material relating to all of García Márquez’s important books, from the landmark “One Hundred Years of Solitude” — represented by the finished typescript sent to his publisher, bearing a hand-lettered title page and only a few corrections — to “We’ll See Each Other in August,” his final, unfinished novel, which exists in as many as 10 versions. Both the Ransom Center and the family declined to provide the price of the deal.

García Márquez expressed wariness at the prospect of scholars picking over his traces. He destroyed his daily working notes and family trees for “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” according to Gerald Martin’s 2009 biography.

“My father was a perfectionist, and a perfectionist doesn’t show work in progress,” Rodrigo García, one of the author’s two sons, said in an interview. “He would always tell anecdotes about characters in the book he was writing, but would only show it when it was about 90 percent there.”

The author did not object that his wife, Mercedes, saved manuscripts of later books, García said, but was “adamant” about more private material. On their engagement, family legend has it, he offered to buy back the love letters he wrote to Mercedes so he could destroy them.

“I don’t think he wanted to leave a personal paper trail,” García said, calling his father a “phone person” who wrote few family letters. “What he would say was, ‘Everything I’ve lived, everything I’ve thought, is in my books.’ ”

García Márquez, who kept few copies of outgoing letters, did correspond with other writers. The estimated 2,000 pieces of correspondence in the archive include letters from Graham Greene, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortázar, Günter Grass and Carlos Fuentes, who in 1979 discussed preparing a letter with Cortázar “to publicly address the issue of U.S. blacklists.” (The travel ban against García Márquez, ostensibly stemming from his involvement with the Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s, was lifted by President Bill Clinton in 1995.)

The archive contains little material relating to his friendship with Fidel Castro or to his political activities, not because anything was held back by the family, his son said, but because García Márquez preferred to conduct such business in person or on the phone.

The archive, which was prepared for sale by the dealer Glenn Horowitz but has yet to be fully cataloged, according to NYT.

The archive also contains notes on a 1998 visit to the White House, when García Márquez asked Clinton if he had any advisers who weren’t “fanatically anti-Castro”.

The more than 40 photo albums in the collection contain some images of Castro, as well as a visual chronicle of the private Gabo, as García Márquez was affectionately known throughout Latin America, beginning with his early life in rural Colombia.