the censor. As he explained to a friend, he sent to the priest “the most Jesuit-like letter I could conceive” to tell him that he would change nothing. In this letter, he wrote one of the things the priest wanted to hear: I am “a good Christian.” And he went on to explain to the priest that he wrote his “social” novella with the goal of describing “a disturbing social reality that I have known firsthand in some villages of Colombia.” In other words, he told the priest that he was not inventing anything, but simply reporting facts; precisely, what he learned to do as a journalist in order to bypass government censors. García Márquez convinced the priest, who authorized the publication of his book. Five years later, he used the same narrative style in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel, in the words of censors in Spain, has no “thesis.” Rather “it just describes situations,” as it were a piece of reporting journalism. Mastering these writing skills helped him secure censors’ approval in Spain and also in Argentina, where One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published.12
Along with censors, several of his friends in journalism, who were also writers, collaborated in García Márquez’s education. At El Universal he befriended Héctor Rojas Herazo and Gustavo Ibarra Merlano. The first wrote rural stories influenced by realism, regionalism, and Faulkner. The second was a poet inspired by ancient Greek literature and especially by Sophocles. Along with siblings Ramiro and Óscar de la Espriella, the three men met at bars and coffee shops, where they talked about women, politics, journalism, and literature. Thanks to this group of friends in Cartagena, García Márquez first encountered the works of Sophocles, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Gómez de la Serna, Faulkner, and Woolf, among others. As mentioned earlier, the last two were the subject of several of his newspaper pieces at the time. By then, journalism and literary writing started to become inseparable for García Márquez. Although the city of Cartagena was not as culturally dynamic as Bogotá, it was an important regional hub. Zabala, Rojas Herazo, and García Márquez attended a talk by leading Spanish poet and Góngora scholar Dámaso Alonso; García Márquez shared with him some of his writing. He also praised the works of his friends from his daily column. He wrote a review of the book of poems by Rojas Herazo, El rostro de la soledad (The Face of Solitude). In his opinion, “La casa entre los robles” (“The House among Oak Trees”) was the most beautiful poem in the book. These and other reviews reveal that early on themes such as solitude and the family house were becoming an integral part of García Márquez’s literary imagination.13
In 1950, the journalist left for the nearby city of Barranquilla in search of a better salary. He worked for the newspaper El Heraldo, which paid him one peso daily. He also joined the so-called Barranquilla Group. Its members were mainly amateur writers and visual artists, who met regularly between 1944 and the late 1950s. They were followers of mainstream North American and European modernist fiction; several of them had already read García Márquez’s short stories in El Espectador. The fact that he used literary techniques imported from modernism facilitated his admission to this group.
As the Cartagena Group did, the Barranquilla Group supervised García Márquez’s literary writing. It oriented his professional readings toward cosmopolitan works of ancient Roman and Greek literature and modernist Western literature. The group helped him financially and lent him books that the impoverished journalist could not afford to buy. It was “a time of . . . discovery,” García Márquez explained. “Not of literature! But of literature applied to real life which, after all, is the big problem of literature.” Unlike what happened to the shy and awkwardly dressed writer in Bogotá, he did not feel outclassed or a cultural outsider in Barranquilla. As a member put it, he “was the [most] provincial of the group” and they did not share his lower middle-class background or rural origins.14 But culturally, García Márquez was a costeño just like most members of the group. Indeed, Barranquilla is less than 150 kilometers away from García Márquez’s birthplace. Thus, his closest group of friends (who even became characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude) shared his culture and bohemian lifestyle. Regular participants during García Márquez’s stay in this city included writers Alfonso Fuenmayor, Germán Vargas, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, painters Alejandro Obregón and Noé León, and photographer Enrique Scopell. Writer and Spanish exile Ramón Vinyes—the character of the wise Catalan in the novel—often led their conversations on journalism, literature, arts, and politics.15
Their conversations were not just about local arts but also cosmopolitan debates about the literary mainstream. Germán Vargas advised the owner of El Mundo bookstore, one of the group’s meeting points, on book selections for its customers. To do this, Vargas read magazines and newspaper supplements such as El Hijo Pródigo from Mexico City and Sur and La Nación from Buenos Aires at the bookstore. Thanks to this up-to-date bookstore, the group received a regular flow of international and regional literary journals and works by Latin American writers such as Cortázar, Borges, Neruda, and Felisberto Hernández as well as foreign writers such as Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, William Saroyan, Erskine Caldwell, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos. Group members also exchanged books they had read. And as copies passed from one member to another, readers could see the handwritten highlights and comments of other members, and sometimes they added their own opinions, continuing their conversations about literature. For a budding writer like García Márquez, such conversations on the printed page were key to learning firsthand why certain passages attracted more attention than others and to understand how writers crafted them.16
More importantly, the Barranquilla Group (and also his friends in Cartagena) advised García Márquez on how to draw inspiration at different levels from other writers. The plot, techniques, and contents of Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s first novella, show his assimilation of the group’s conventions about how to write literature. He started to write Leaf Storm in the late 1940s and published it in 1955. This novella combines the dramatic fact of an unburied corpse, taken from Sophocles’s Antigone, the Ancient Greek classic from the fifth century BC, and Faulkner’s modernist techniques and style in As I Lay Dying (1930).17 The choice of Antigone was not an accident. Multiple versions of this play were available in the region because, since the nineteenth century, major writers had imagined it as a Latin American tragedy.18 In 1951, when García Márquez was writing his novella, Argentine writer Leopoldo Marechal premiered a successful adaptation in Buenos Aires, entitled Antigone Vélez, which was set in the Argentine lowlands known as the Pampas. Whereas Antigone was a model of Latin Americanism, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying served as a model of cosmopolitanism. Thus, the choice of this novel was not an accident either. Faulkner’s story is set in the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. The story is narrated from fifteen different points of view, using stream of consciousness and interior monologues, among other techniques. García Márquez’s Leaf Storm is his first book set in the imaginary village of Macondo (the center of most of his fiction until after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude). The story is narrated from three points of view and uses Faulknerian stream of consciousness and interior monologues.19
Regarding the novella’s style, group members helped García Márquez develop it. Its style, naturalist and descriptive, had to be different from the subjectivity narrative of writers like Marcel Proust or the omniscient narrator as in the works of Gustave Flaubert. Rather, García Márquez (and the group) followed Faulkner’s style. In one of his first interviews, he proudly stated that he wanted to do something “similar to Faulkner’s in his work As I Lay Dying.’ ”20 In reality, what he did was not so original. Faulkner was a highly acclaimed author in Latin America and winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. As shown in chapter 1, Faulkner not only influenced García Márquez’s local literary groups in Barranquilla and Cartagena but also shaped senior, mid-career, and emerging writers in the region that the young García Márquez read during his formative years: Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay), João Guimarães Rosa (Brazil), Ernesto Sábato (Argentina), Juan Rulfo (Mexico), Alejo Carpentier
