Alvaro Mutis Biography

Álvaro Mutis

(Álvaro Mutis Jaramillo; Bogotá, Colombia, 1923-Mexico City, 2013) Colombian writer and poet.Author noted for the verbal richness of his production and a characteristic combination of lyrical and narrative, he participated in the early days of the movement of poets grouped around the magazine Mito.Influenced by Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Saint-John Perse and Walt Whitman, he used poetry as a means of knowledge to access unknown universes, to new worlds where love and a good death were possible.His alter ego is Maqroll, a shadowy yet innocent adventurer who sings of the fragile human condition.His work was recognized with such prestigious awards as the Prince of Asturias (1997) and the Cervantes Prize (2001).

Álvaro Mutis

Son of international lawyer Santiago Mutis Dávila and Carolina Jaramillo, in 1925 his father entered the diplomatic service and the family had to move to Brussels, where the head of the family had been appointed minister counselor.In Belgium his brother Leopold was born in 1928, and in 1931 his father died suddenly.The grieving mother returned to Colombia and settled in the Coello farm (located at the confluence of the Coello and Cocora rivers, in the department of Tolima).The farm had belonged to the maternal grandfather, the pioneer Jerónimo Jaramillo Uribe, one of the founders of Armenia, and Dona Carolina had just inherited it.Mutis remained in Brussels studying at the Saint Michel school of the Jesuit fathers, in which he soaked up historical knowledge, especially about Byzantium.

The Coello farm, and Colombia in general, represented in those years for Mutis a vacation spot.However, the experience of physical contact with the tropics, with the hot land climate, the aroma of coffee, banana and fruit trees would mark his later literary production.Despite the fact that for Mutis the world was Europe, the repeated trips by boat to Colombia (in small cargo and passenger ships, which arrived in Buenaventura three weeks after setting sail, after which they had to travel by car, train and horse to the maternal home) were another fundamental experience in the formation of the writer.It is not unusual, then, to find that the main character in Álvaro Mutis's novels, Maqroll el Gaviero, is debated between certain contradictions, lives between Europe and America, in totally contrasting worlds, considers the Old Continent as the cradle of civilization and to the New World as force, and that, dissatisfied with both, try to create a universe in his adventures in accordance with his ideals.

Álvaro Mutis did not finish high school.Due to his mother's financial problems, he had to drop out of school in Brussels and enrolled at the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Bogotá.But he was not interested in studying the regular pensum ; he liked to read history, travel, and literature books, and was not concerned with learning math and other minutiae.In 1941, when he was only eighteen years old, he preferred to marry Mireya Durán, with whom he would have three children.

Like many of the great contemporary writers, he completed a demanding journey of formative readings that began with Julio Verne and Emilio Salgari, passed through Honoré de Balzac and Flaubert and through the Russian masters (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov) to finish, in that first stage, with Kafka, Franz Werfel and Rainer Maria Rilke.He also read a lot about Latin Americans, but the one who moved him the most was Pablo Neruda with his Residence on Earth .At the Colegio del Rosario he had Eduardo Carranza as a professor of literature, who taught him the importance of poets such as Juan Ramón Jiménez and the Spaniards of the generation of '27 (Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Pedro Salinas, Luis Cernuda or Miguel Hernández, among others).

Once married, and to earn a living, he joined the radio.Initially, in 1942, he worked at the Nuevo Mundo radio station, which over the years became the headquarters of the Colombian Radio Network, Caracol.There he replaced Jorge Zalamea in the direction of the program "Actualidad literaria".He related to the intellectual and bohemian world of Bogotá and met the critic Casimiro Eiger, whom Mutis would appreciate to facilitate his entry into the world of women.letters.This mysterious character escaped from the works of Proust exercised a certain tutelary role in the young intelligentsia of that time, similar to that played by Ramón Vinyes in the Barranquilla Group.

He also became friends with critics and writers Hernando Téllez and Eduardo Zalamea; He frequented the traditional cafes El Molino, El Asturias and El Automático, where he approached two different generations of poets: Los Nuevos and Los de Piedra y Cielo.He also met the brothers Otto and León de Greiff, the first of them very important in his training as a music lover.In 1942, he was hired by Radiodifusora Nacional as a newscaster, an activity in which he remained until 1946, when the Colombian Insurance Company appointed him chief editor of its institutional magazine, Vida; his first writings appeared there: small literary portraits of Joseph Conrad, Alexander Pushkin, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or Joachim Murat.And also his first poem, entitled "The crescent".

During that time he had an important approach to the surrealists: Saint-John Perse, translated by Jorge Zalamea, André Breton and his Poisson salubre .The latter was decisive in his first poems, as he wanted to be surrealist, to the point that his opening verses were to be titled "The perfumed zebra." He was also influenced by the Venezuelan poet Juan Sánchez Peláez, cultural attaché at the Venezuelan Embassy in Bogotá, who led him to a magical world, to a dazzling vocabulary.In 1947 he met the Guatemalan poet Luis Cardoza y Aragón, who was the Guatemalan ambassador to Colombia, and the painters Fernando Botero and Alejandro Obregón.

The following year he became friends with Ernesto Volkening, who, likewise that Casimiro Eiger, played a very important role in the literary journey of Mutis.Eiger learned about fragments of Mutis's work and encouraged him to publish some texts in the supplement of the newspaper La Razón, which Alberto Zalamea directed.At that time there was the group of Cuadernícolas, which, although it was not homogeneous, liked to publish their verses in notebooks.Mutis followed the fashion and, together with Carlos Patiño Roselli and encouraged by Volkening, published the poetry notebook La balanza , with illustrations by Hernando Tejada, which was sold out due to incineration on April 9, 1948.The Cuadernito received some criticism and Mutis waited four years to publish his second book: The elements of disaster , which because of its freshness and purity shook the world of Colombian letters.

The work It consists of fourteen poems that form an apocalyptic vision of man, in which doubt, fear and destruction are shown, elements that annihilate the human being.This book had the critical reading of Volkening and with him Mutis was configured as the main young Colombian poet.While consolidating as a writer, he began an important career as a public relations and publicist, because, from the beginning, he understood that with literature he was not going to receive a higher income.He was advertising director of the Compañía Colombiana de Seguros y de Bavaria, head of public relations for Lansa, and after the bankruptcy of the latter company, he became head of public relations for Esso in 1954.Such jobs forced him to travel, with which he knew the whole country and part of the world.Many of his poems from that time were written in airplanes, airports, and hotel rooms.

The two years he stayed at Esso were almost total literary recess; However, Maqroll el Gaviero was born from Mutis' experiences in the oil fields that ran along the Magdalena River, from Barrancabermeja to Barranquilla.It should be noted that Gaviero is the sailor who watches over everyone else from the highest point of the ship; its symbol for the office of poetry.At Esso, Mutis handled significant amounts of money that the company allocated to different activities: a good percentage was for charities, and especially for the National Secretariat for Social Assistance (SENDAS).But the poet gave it a different use: he invested it in quixotic cultural enterprises and the company sued it, since its relations with the dictatorship were at stake.Mutis had to travel urgently to Mexico in 1956.

It was the second time he had visited that country (the first had been in 1952) and since then it became his place of residence.He came into contact with the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and the producer Luis de Llano.Buñuel always dreamed of taking to the cinema Mutis's novel La mansión de Araucaíma (1973), "a gothic tale of hot land." Thanks to both, Mutis got a job in an advertising agency for television.He was fully linked to Mexican cultural life and befriended the writers Octavio Paz, Juan José Arreola, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska.

He did not lose ties with Colombia, as he sporadically collaborated in Myth magazine.In 1959, the prestigious magazine published as a separate book Review of overseas hospitals , which marked the appearance in the world of letters of the romantic character of Maqroll el Gaviero, who comes to embody the consciousness of the poet.In 1959 the lawsuits against him became effective and he was confined in the Mexican jail of Lecumberri for one year and three months.A new experience for his training as a writer, because, in addition to knowing the unrewarding prison life, he managed to overcome fears and ghosts.From that period of his life it is necessary to highlight the discipline he had in devouring books; he read for the second time the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time , by Marcel Proust, of whom he had a portrait in his cell.He gave shape to the stories "Saraya", "The last face", "Before the cock cante" and "The death of the strategist", to some poems of The lost works (1965), and wrote the Diario de Lecumberri (1960), a direct result of his stay in prison, in which he narrates, in a moving way, the life and death of "Palitos".The book was published by the Universidad Veracruzana.

After jail, some years later, Mutis became sales manager for Latin America at Twentieth Century Fox and then at Columbia Pictures (where he remained until to retire in 1988), companies that allowed him to continue traveling the world.Between 1960 and 1973, he did relatively little in literature: in 1962 he published four texts under the pseudonym Álvar de Mattos (Portuguese diplomat) in Snob magazine, directed by Salvador Elizondo and Emilio García Riera: "Little story of a great business "," History and fiction of a mangy little soldier "," General Bonaparte in Nizza "and" The incident of Maiquetía or Isaac saved from the cages ".In 1964, at the Casa del Lago of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he gave a series of lectures dedicated to his literary devotions: Valéry Larbaud, Joseph Conrad and Marcel Proust.Such conferences would be published that same year in the UNAM magazine, directed by Jaime García Terrés.

In 1965 his book Lost works was published, with which he won the Prize National of Nadaism for poetry of that year.At that time, he was already considered the best Colombian poet of the moment, although, definitely, his vision of literature and the country was extremely pessimistic.He said, for example, that "literature is a painful bondage to me, and I do not feel the slightest sympathy for it.I am somewhat overwhelmed, for example, by the overwhelming mountain of literature that we Colombians produce and that in many cases hides our miserable reality of our situation before the world." His approach to violence was stark and realistic: "Violence in Colombia is the result of secular repressions and inhibitions to which the Colombian has been subjected for historical and social reasons.As a phenomenon it seems healthy and recommendable, it is an awakening.All civilizations have been based on human sacrifices, violence, humiliation and blood.Why do Colombians believe that we are free from this servitude? Perhaps because of rhetorical and artificial we really believe that we were the Switzerland of America.Let us forget that the Swiss filled Europe with blood as mercenary soldiers before forming their idyllic confederation."

In 1973 Summa de Maqroll el Gaviero (1947-1970) was published in Spain, which contained the works First poems , The elements of disaster , The lost jobs , Overview of overseas hospitals and Count of certain visions .In 1977 he started the weekly column "Rincón Reactionary "in the newspaper Uno mas Uno, which later continued in El Sol de México and in the newspaper Novedades.In 1978, a second edition of La mansión de Araucaíma was published, along with the four written stories in jail.

Only in 1982 did a new book of poems by Álvaro Mutis appear: Caravansary , published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica; that year his great friend Gabriel García Márquez, whom he had met in 1950, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.Mutis, along with other mutual friends such as Guillermo Angulo, Álvaro Castaño Castillo and Gloria Valencia de Castaño, Alfonso Fuenmayor, Gonzalo Mallarino, Alejandro Obregón, Hernán Vieco and Fernando Gómez Agudelo, were special guests of the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude to the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm.The following year he was awarded the National Poetry Prize in Colombia.

After the award, Álvaro Mutis' literary career continued to rise.In 1984 the Fund of Economic Culture published The emissaries ; the following year Editorial Cátedra published Old Chronicle and Praise of the Kingdom , and received in Mexico the Los Abriles critics award for his book Los emisarios .In 1986 Mutis burst into the world of letters with his first great novel: The admiral's snow , the first volume of the series Companies and tribulations by Maqroll el Gaviero ; in 1989 he won the Medici Prize for the best book translated into French for that novel.Also in 1986, El Equilibrista de México published A tribute and seven nights .

In 1987 the second work of the saga appeared: Ilona arrives with the rain , which earned him the Order of the Aztec Eagle.In 1988 the Universidad del Valle granted him the degree of doctor honoris causa in letters, and he received the Xavier Villaurrutia award.The literary magazine Gradiva, directed by his son Santiago Mutis Durán, published the book After the routes of Maqroll el Gaviero , which brings together the most important critical studies on the work of Álvaro Mutis, some interviews and a reprint from the short story The True Story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin .

The third work in Maqroll's series, A Bel Die , appeared in 1989; He also published The last scale of the Tramp Steamer .The French government awarded him the Order of Arts and Letters in the rank of knight.In 1990 the novel Amirbar was published at the same time in Colombia and Spain; The Italian government awarded him the Nonino prize for the best foreign book published in Italy and released another volume of Companies and tribulations : Abdul Basuhr, dreamer of ships .

In 1993, on the occasion of his seventy years, a week of tribute to Álvaro Mutis was organized; Among the most moving events was the recital he gave at the León de Greiff Auditorium of the National University, which was attended by more than six thousand people; Furthermore, the University of Antioquia awarded him the degree of doctor honoris causa in literature and the Colombian government awarded him the Cross of Boyacá, at a gala dinner at the Casa de Nariño.National recognition was endorsed by a series of important international awards.Thus, in 1997 he was awarded the Cavour Prize, in Italy, and the Prince of Asturias, in Spain, and in 2001 he won the highest award for Castilian letters, the Cervantes Prize.To his series of works on Maqroll he added a new publication: Contexts for Maqroll (1997).