“A poet can endure anything”, Bolaño’s story begins, but one of the two poets at its centre, Enrique Martín, fails first at poetry, and then at life. Along the way, as Bolaño’s alter ego Arturo Belano relates in this mysterious, melancholy story, we get UFOs, paranoia, squabbles over appearances in small literary magazines, and a Frank O’Hara namecheck. Martín, despised by Belano, is a pathetic figure, a man who “wanted to be a poet, and…threw himself into this endeavour with all his energy and willpower” (which nods back to Walser’s line about Kleist: “he wants to abandon himself to the entire catastrophe of being a poet” – a line that reminds me of O’Hara, and so round and round it goes).
Another association. Something about Belano and Martín’s relationship makes me think of ‘William Wilson’, my favourite Edgar Allan Poe story. Wilson is antagonised by his doppelgänger, and for Belano also, Martín represents an unwelcome reflection, a reminder of the possibility and misery of failure: Belano’s success could easily have resembled Martín’s lack of it.
Bolaño loved Poe, writing in his ‘Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories’ that “The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read”, a statement I rank alongside his ridiculous and beautiful claim that “I could live under a table reading Borges”.
From Last Evenings on Earth, Harvill Secker 2007
