Silvina Ocampo.

Silvina Ocampo was the youngest of six sisters who grew up in Argentina when it was one of the richest countries in the world, and when the Ocampo family was one of the richest families in Argentina.

Silvina was part of a magical circle whose nucleus was formed by Jorge Luis Borges and, among others, the younger man who would become her husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares. Each member of this circle created his or her own works, and also worked in collaboration. While each writer had his or her own style, as the Sur group—around the important journal Sur, founded by Silvina’s eldest sister, Victoria, in consultation with the New York writer Waldo Frank—they shaped a literary cultural identity and a new literary genre. In their collaborative work, the trio of Silvina Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Adolfo Bioy Casares became a quartet with the creation of yet another writerly persona (or personae). For example, Bioy and Silvina (married in 1940; he was eleven years younger) wrote with four hands a detective thriller spoof, literally Those Who Love, Hate. In 1940, Borges, Bioy, and Silvina published a famous anthology of fantastic literature, and when Bioy and Borges wrote together, the writer they created had various pseudonyms (taken from the names of their ancestors) like “Bustos Domecq” or “Benito Suarez Lynch.” Silvina contributed to those literary ventures and inventions as well, but she didn’t sign on as an official contributor, perhaps because her collaboration was exclusively oral.

For many years, Victoria was the only famous Ocampo sister, a celebrity in the intellectual circle coalescing in the thirties and forties, known as much for her elegant beauty as for her intelligence. Among the illuminati whose friendship she cultivated were José Ortega y Gasset, Virginia Woolf, Paul Valéry, Lawrence of Arabia, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, and Rabindranath Tagore; she had passionate affairs with a number of distinguished writers (including Roger Caillois and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who, unlike Victoria and most of those close to her, was pro-Axis and committed suicide at the end of World War II); she commissioned Borges to translate Woolf’s Orlando and other works (we readers in Spanish have read that version for generations, and are familiar with the legend that Borges crafted it with his mother, another four-handed duet). In addition to being an editor in chief and a cultural entrepreneur, Victoria was a self-styled patroness, and her generosity was legendary, as when, for example, Tagore visited Buenos Aires in 1924, and Victoria sold a diamond tiara to put him up in a luxury hotel for two months. Read More

Learning a new language in old age is said to be good for the brain and the memory, so in my mid-’70s I took up German. I didn’t want to learn tourist or business German, I wanted to read poetry. I find it easier to remember poetry than prose, and could still recall odd snatches of Goethe that had come my way when doing an O-Level way back in the fifties. Maybe I could add some Rilke or some Hölderlin to my memory bank? I’d long wanted to read them. About thirty years ago, I found myself at dinner sitting next to a cultural attaché from the Goethe-Institut and talking to him about this very vague wish. I was just making polite conversation, but a day or two later in the post a handsome bilingual volume of Michael Hamburger’s translations of Hölderlin arrived. It’s the Routledge and Kegan Paul edition, Poems and Fragments, dated 1966, bound in dark blue and maroon leather, with copper foil lettering. I was touched and impressed by this thoughtfulness, and occasionally, in my then very busy life, I would open the volume, which I kept by my bed, and read a few lines. There was one fragment that enchanted me, four lines that I would read again and again and learned almost by heart:

Read More

Homelessness is a crisis that, if you’re lucky, never happens to you. Many, however, live in a suspended state of perpetually tenuous living called houselessness. Houselessness is denoted not so much as a lack of roof over one’s head but rather looks like the problem of too many roofs. Houselessness means a vulnerable position that’s also invisible: the roof or sublet or room or couch or yeah, sure, just crash here for the weekend is a mask that keeps concern at bay. Strangers, employers, even relatives are short on empathy for those who they assume are at least meeting the physiological minimums in the famed hierarchy of needs. As a society we are bad enough to people who certainly aren’t. It isn’t a competition to be sure, for houselessness makes a poor consolation prize, more a transient condition punctuated by periods of homelessness, stability, houselessness, and back again. A delayed check, closed office, changed schedule, misread address, an administrative shutdown, an overlooked email—the frustrated reminders that slow still exists in a world where messages cross the ocean in less than a breath—might mean the difference between living or not. This is the usual.

And, then, sometimes the circumstances that tip the scale are more divinely wrought: sometimes crisis begins in fire.

On April 7, 2012, a fire broke out in an apartment complex in the Pennville neighborhood of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Though no serious injuries were reported, one woman—in whose home the fire started—was treated for smoke inhalation, and five units were damaged, displacing several families and depriving many more of electricity. KFOR-TV, an NBC affiliate, reported the story, which included a brief interview with one of the residents, Kimberly Wilkins, who ran for her life as the building burned.

On camera, the light is enough to make out the smoke-stained wall behind her, yet it’s unclear how much time separates the witness exclusive from the event witnessed. Wilkins, shot from the shoulders up, her head nearly filling the frame, appears on camera with all the warmth of a ghost (ashy, as someone less sympathetic might say). Whether washed by fear, stress, or the spotlight, it’s also hard to tell. The pixie cut mostly hidden in a neatly knotted scarf might be wrapped for bed or ready for some fifteen seconds of fame. Read More