|
|
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Hijuelos
CREATIVE NONFICTION ESSAY BY RICHARD OYAMA
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in American life. Oscar Hijuelos was the first Latino to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love in 1989, but he could never duplicate the success of that second novel. He died of a heart attack at 62 in October 2013.
It was a blow. Oscar and I grew up on West 118th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I knew him as a pudgy, thin-shouldered kid, a fellow student interested in creative writing at The City College of New York and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whom I’d meet at readings in the San Francisco Bay Area and Albuquerque. He was a mentor, an encourager and an abidingly loyal, generous friend.
Oscar was a lonely kid. I don’t recall ever exchanging words with him. I knew nothing of the “busy and boisterous household” that he described in a 2011 essay for The New York Times: “As songs like ‘The Peanut Vendor’ by the Cugat orchestra gushed out of the record player, and people ate plates of arroz con pollo with tostones or some crispy lechón, others—mostly young couples in love, like Frankie the exterminator and his fiancée—took to the dance floor and mamboed away.”
He could’ve been lost in the linguistic muddle he describes in the 2012 memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes. During an otherwise idyllic visit with his mother’s family in Holguìn in eastern Cuba, Oscar contracted nephritis, a life-threatening inflammation of the kidneys, spent a year in hospital in Connecticut, lost his facility for Spanish and, he wrote, “therefore, my roots.” He had migrated from the island of his home language to a continent in the north. To me, Oscar seemed an amorphous being, one who lived in the distance, because that deep sense of estrangement was inside him. “I always had a solitary air about me,” he wrote in The Times.
Two of my quasi-gangster friends—one, a straight-up sadist—taunted and bullied Oscar. I didn’t engage in that shit. At the time I knew nothing about his Latino heritage, but I may have recognized another watcher. I wonder if Oscar didn’t remember that abstention from violence, since he regarded me kindly.
Later, Oscar became friends with my older brother Bob and his friend Bruce Provinzano and would drop by the tiny apartment they shared on 119th Street to drink booze, smoke reefer and watch TV. Sometimes I’d see him there. We were both attending CCNY by then. Oscar was beginning to write fiction, while I was making myself into a fledging poet.
His former teacher and fellow novelist Frederick Tuten testified to his ferocious work ethic. “I’d assign a five-page paper,” he said, “and Oscar would bring in ten.” He received early encouragement from Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag. His first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983), a sad, lovely book, tells the story of the Santinio family's migration from Cuba to America. Oscar wrote his first novel on nights and weekends, while working full-time at an ad agency.
In that novel, Hijuelos fictionalized the events of his childhood. The American-born son Hector's identity is bifurcated. He loves and fears Cuba, yet grows sick of being Americanized, wanting to "crawl out of his skin." His father Alejo works as a waiter, squanders opportunities and lapses into alcoholic stupors and infidelities, beating his two sons. The mother succumbs to a wistful nostalgia for her hometown in Cuba.
Oscar was big-hearted and generous. I remember a party at our old apartment on Morningside Drive when he read one of my apprentice poems and enthusiastically praised it. He later introduced me to two editors and his agent in New York, helping to shepherd me through the process of submitting a first novel in manuscript. Oscar was willing to encourage other writers, because he knew self-doubt so well. In an interview on the PBS News Hour after publication of the memoir, he said that he only grew confident of his gifts after the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize and translations of his work into multiple languages.
His most famous book is a picaresque novel of two Cuban musician-brothers, Cesar and the somber Nestor Castillo, who immigrate to the U.S. and get their big break with a TV appearance on “I Love Lucy” with the support of Desi Arnaz. It’s a rambunctious book, spilling over with so much rich period detail and Rabelaisian carnal delight that a reader may forget that it’s shot through with Cesar’s melancholia for his dead brother and the Manhattan of the Forties that’s gone forever.
I witnessed the way some readers confused the work with the author. As an adult, Oscar was a man with a stocky build. Yet when we were teenagers, he came over to my family’s apartment to borrow weightlifting equipment that I had used when I competed for the Brooklyn Tech swim team and forgot about when I started college. Did Oscar undergo a muscle-building regimen like the one Yukio Mishima described in Confessions of a Mask (or that I would see in the Charles Atlas before/after ads in comic books)? In Mishima’s novel, the “I” protagonist has an epiphany about the physical ugliness of the intellectual and remakes his torso into the sort of male physique he admired. If so, part of Oscar’s persona was self-invention. What he couldn’t alter was his pale complexion.
“(U)nlike my mother and father, who were dark-featured,” he wrote in The Times, “I was fair-skinned, blond, hazel-eyed, my looks a throwback to a distant Irish ancestor.” So maybe it should come as no surprise that he encountered ridiculous reactions like the one he had at Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley soon after he won the Pulitzer.
“You know, you’re not at all what I expected,” an Anglo woman said during the Q&A.
In other words, Oscar wasn’t at all like his fictional protagonist, musician Cesar Castillo—dark, swarthy, handsome, with “Latin Lover mystique” like, say, macho movie star Anthony Quinn, himself of Mexican-Irish descent. Oscar launched into a long, furious disquisition about the criollo intermingling of Spanish and African blood, the color hierarchy, the resultant variations in skin tone, shade and the like. He was blazing with anger. As he said on the Newshour, he was only one of multiple “versions” of being Latino. He never claimed to represent anyone but himself.
It was probably during that same visit that Oscar and I had a drink at the bar in the Fairmount Hotel where he was staying in San Francisco. When I asked him about his post-Pulitzer success, he described it as surreal. He told Ray Suarez on PBS that his life had grown more “populated.” My brother and his friends reported that Oscar was hanging with the likes of Lou Reed and playwright August Wilson, another Pulitzer awardee.
The last time I saw Oscar and his wife Lori Marie Carlson, was when they were invited to teach workshops at the 2008 National Latino Writers Conference at NHCC in Albuquerque. My friend Greta Pullen, head librarian, co-organized the event with Carlos Vasquez, History & Literary Arts director and administrator Katie Trujillo. I attended the conference-ending banquet and sat at a table with Oscar and Lori. For all of Oscar’s guardedness, he exuded an immediate warmth and, even, relief in my presence. It was as though for an hour or two he could shed the celebrity trappings and media mythology that came with being “the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize,” and just hang out with another homeboy.
If Oscar was self-effacing, he could also be extremely acerbic and cutting. I saw that side of him when we were young men. I saw it again that night at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. He and Lori had spent the day sightseeing in Santa Fe. When Greta asked him how he liked The City Different, Oscar said, “It was jive.”
He never lost touch with the street. He grew up in a neighborhood near Harlem where it wasn’t at all unusual to hear friends of all ethnicities—Anglo, Latino, Asian, black—playing the dozens, capping on your mother, bashing one another with the ugly stick. Oscar came up the hard way.
At the same time, while a beloved Chicano poet read, Oscar showed no patience with that brand of identity politics with its codification of images, phrases, allusions and subjects. The peculiarity of Oscar’s Kaspar Hauser-like childhood—his infirmity, the year-long hospital confinement, the virtual incarceration at home, his love for and estrangement from ancestral culture—must’ve marked him permanently. He paid a large cost for his success: tax problems, familial obligations, a failed first marriage, an aborted musical adaptation, substance abuse; but that chaos fed a sort of disordered life into his pages.
Critics were not always kind after The Mambo Kings. Times reviewer Michio Kakutani described Empress of the Splendid Season as “attenuated” and wrote that it was riddled with class stereotypes.
Lydia Espana, a Cuban American cleaning lady, is the protagonist of that 1999 novel. Disparities of wealth and class, ambitions achieved and thwarted, statuses honored and disremembered, are refracted through her immigrant perspective. The author reverses the predictable arc of Horatio Alger novels and the fleeting American Dream.
It’s surely true that the novel is nowhere near as big and exuberant as The Mambo Kings, but the prose is more sure-footed and avoids some of the repetitions that marred the earlier work. What's alive for me is Lydia’s interior life, her reveries about a privileged childhood in Cuba, the alienation she feels from her American-born children and her fractious marriage. It’s to Oscar’s credit that he had the cojones to write a working female immigrant character into the book’s nucleus.
If Oscar’s memoir contains affectionate reminiscences about other writers, I should mention that it also includes a fair share of score-settling with literary pendejos. He recalls the indignities a light-skinned Hispanic author experienced in that instant trajectory from obscurity to the highest rung of the pantheon. Fame came with a price; his memoir is braided with sorrow and disillusionment.
CREATIVE NONFICTION ESSAY BY RICHARD OYAMA
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in American life. Oscar Hijuelos was the first Latino to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love in 1989, but he could never duplicate the success of that second novel. He died of a heart attack at 62 in October 2013.
It was a blow. Oscar and I grew up on West 118th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I knew him as a pudgy, thin-shouldered kid, a fellow student interested in creative writing at The City College of New York and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whom I’d meet at readings in the San Francisco Bay Area and Albuquerque. He was a mentor, an encourager and an abidingly loyal, generous friend.
Oscar was a lonely kid. I don’t recall ever exchanging words with him. I knew nothing of the “busy and boisterous household” that he described in a 2011 essay for The New York Times: “As songs like ‘The Peanut Vendor’ by the Cugat orchestra gushed out of the record player, and people ate plates of arroz con pollo with tostones or some crispy lechón, others—mostly young couples in love, like Frankie the exterminator and his fiancée—took to the dance floor and mamboed away.”
He could’ve been lost in the linguistic muddle he describes in the 2012 memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes. During an otherwise idyllic visit with his mother’s family in Holguìn in eastern Cuba, Oscar contracted nephritis, a life-threatening inflammation of the kidneys, spent a year in hospital in Connecticut, lost his facility for Spanish and, he wrote, “therefore, my roots.” He had migrated from the island of his home language to a continent in the north. To me, Oscar seemed an amorphous being, one who lived in the distance, because that deep sense of estrangement was inside him. “I always had a solitary air about me,” he wrote in The Times.
Two of my quasi-gangster friends—one, a straight-up sadist—taunted and bullied Oscar. I didn’t engage in that shit. At the time I knew nothing about his Latino heritage, but I may have recognized another watcher. I wonder if Oscar didn’t remember that abstention from violence, since he regarded me kindly.
Later, Oscar became friends with my older brother Bob and his friend Bruce Provinzano and would drop by the tiny apartment they shared on 119th Street to drink booze, smoke reefer and watch TV. Sometimes I’d see him there. We were both attending CCNY by then. Oscar was beginning to write fiction, while I was making myself into a fledging poet.
His former teacher and fellow novelist Frederick Tuten testified to his ferocious work ethic. “I’d assign a five-page paper,” he said, “and Oscar would bring in ten.” He received early encouragement from Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag. His first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983), a sad, lovely book, tells the story of the Santinio family's migration from Cuba to America. Oscar wrote his first novel on nights and weekends, while working full-time at an ad agency.
In that novel, Hijuelos fictionalized the events of his childhood. The American-born son Hector's identity is bifurcated. He loves and fears Cuba, yet grows sick of being Americanized, wanting to "crawl out of his skin." His father Alejo works as a waiter, squanders opportunities and lapses into alcoholic stupors and infidelities, beating his two sons. The mother succumbs to a wistful nostalgia for her hometown in Cuba.
Oscar was big-hearted and generous. I remember a party at our old apartment on Morningside Drive when he read one of my apprentice poems and enthusiastically praised it. He later introduced me to two editors and his agent in New York, helping to shepherd me through the process of submitting a first novel in manuscript. Oscar was willing to encourage other writers, because he knew self-doubt so well. In an interview on the PBS News Hour after publication of the memoir, he said that he only grew confident of his gifts after the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize and translations of his work into multiple languages.
His most famous book is a picaresque novel of two Cuban musician-brothers, Cesar and the somber Nestor Castillo, who immigrate to the U.S. and get their big break with a TV appearance on “I Love Lucy” with the support of Desi Arnaz. It’s a rambunctious book, spilling over with so much rich period detail and Rabelaisian carnal delight that a reader may forget that it’s shot through with Cesar’s melancholia for his dead brother and the Manhattan of the Forties that’s gone forever.
I witnessed the way some readers confused the work with the author. As an adult, Oscar was a man with a stocky build. Yet when we were teenagers, he came over to my family’s apartment to borrow weightlifting equipment that I had used when I competed for the Brooklyn Tech swim team and forgot about when I started college. Did Oscar undergo a muscle-building regimen like the one Yukio Mishima described in Confessions of a Mask (or that I would see in the Charles Atlas before/after ads in comic books)? In Mishima’s novel, the “I” protagonist has an epiphany about the physical ugliness of the intellectual and remakes his torso into the sort of male physique he admired. If so, part of Oscar’s persona was self-invention. What he couldn’t alter was his pale complexion.
“(U)nlike my mother and father, who were dark-featured,” he wrote in The Times, “I was fair-skinned, blond, hazel-eyed, my looks a throwback to a distant Irish ancestor.” So maybe it should come as no surprise that he encountered ridiculous reactions like the one he had at Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley soon after he won the Pulitzer.
“You know, you’re not at all what I expected,” an Anglo woman said during the Q&A.
In other words, Oscar wasn’t at all like his fictional protagonist, musician Cesar Castillo—dark, swarthy, handsome, with “Latin Lover mystique” like, say, macho movie star Anthony Quinn, himself of Mexican-Irish descent. Oscar launched into a long, furious disquisition about the criollo intermingling of Spanish and African blood, the color hierarchy, the resultant variations in skin tone, shade and the like. He was blazing with anger. As he said on the Newshour, he was only one of multiple “versions” of being Latino. He never claimed to represent anyone but himself.
It was probably during that same visit that Oscar and I had a drink at the bar in the Fairmount Hotel where he was staying in San Francisco. When I asked him about his post-Pulitzer success, he described it as surreal. He told Ray Suarez on PBS that his life had grown more “populated.” My brother and his friends reported that Oscar was hanging with the likes of Lou Reed and playwright August Wilson, another Pulitzer awardee.
The last time I saw Oscar and his wife Lori Marie Carlson, was when they were invited to teach workshops at the 2008 National Latino Writers Conference at NHCC in Albuquerque. My friend Greta Pullen, head librarian, co-organized the event with Carlos Vasquez, History & Literary Arts director and administrator Katie Trujillo. I attended the conference-ending banquet and sat at a table with Oscar and Lori. For all of Oscar’s guardedness, he exuded an immediate warmth and, even, relief in my presence. It was as though for an hour or two he could shed the celebrity trappings and media mythology that came with being “the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize,” and just hang out with another homeboy.
If Oscar was self-effacing, he could also be extremely acerbic and cutting. I saw that side of him when we were young men. I saw it again that night at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. He and Lori had spent the day sightseeing in Santa Fe. When Greta asked him how he liked The City Different, Oscar said, “It was jive.”
He never lost touch with the street. He grew up in a neighborhood near Harlem where it wasn’t at all unusual to hear friends of all ethnicities—Anglo, Latino, Asian, black—playing the dozens, capping on your mother, bashing one another with the ugly stick. Oscar came up the hard way.
At the same time, while a beloved Chicano poet read, Oscar showed no patience with that brand of identity politics with its codification of images, phrases, allusions and subjects. The peculiarity of Oscar’s Kaspar Hauser-like childhood—his infirmity, the year-long hospital confinement, the virtual incarceration at home, his love for and estrangement from ancestral culture—must’ve marked him permanently. He paid a large cost for his success: tax problems, familial obligations, a failed first marriage, an aborted musical adaptation, substance abuse; but that chaos fed a sort of disordered life into his pages.
Critics were not always kind after The Mambo Kings. Times reviewer Michio Kakutani described Empress of the Splendid Season as “attenuated” and wrote that it was riddled with class stereotypes.
Lydia Espana, a Cuban American cleaning lady, is the protagonist of that 1999 novel. Disparities of wealth and class, ambitions achieved and thwarted, statuses honored and disremembered, are refracted through her immigrant perspective. The author reverses the predictable arc of Horatio Alger novels and the fleeting American Dream.
It’s surely true that the novel is nowhere near as big and exuberant as The Mambo Kings, but the prose is more sure-footed and avoids some of the repetitions that marred the earlier work. What's alive for me is Lydia’s interior life, her reveries about a privileged childhood in Cuba, the alienation she feels from her American-born children and her fractious marriage. It’s to Oscar’s credit that he had the cojones to write a working female immigrant character into the book’s nucleus.
If Oscar’s memoir contains affectionate reminiscences about other writers, I should mention that it also includes a fair share of score-settling with literary pendejos. He recalls the indignities a light-skinned Hispanic author experienced in that instant trajectory from obscurity to the highest rung of the pantheon. Fame came with a price; his memoir is braided with sorrow and disillusionment.
In the end, since I knew where he came from, Oscar Hijuelos’ career encapsulated for me the impossible hope that anything is possible even as his bawdy, elegiac, romantic body of work implies a more complex story of chances taken and chances missed.
Richard Oyama is a novelist and poet. His first novel, A Riot Goin’ On, is forthcoming. He is currently working on a second book and living in Thailand.
© richard oyama.
