Reasons of State

ALEJO CARPENTIER
(1904–1980) was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son of a French architect and a Russian-language teacher. When he was eight years old, the family moved to Cuba. Carpentier studied architecture at the University of Havana, but he left school and began to work as a political and cultural critic to support his mother after his parents’ marriage broke up. He soon became a founding member of
Revista de Avance
, a magazine devoted to the avant-garde, and his involvement in leftist groups that resisted the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado y Morales led to his arrest in 1927. After his release, he escaped to Paris and spent the next eleven years there, immersing himself in the Surrealist movement and writing his first novel,
Écue-Yamba-O
, an exploration of Afro-Cuban traditions among the poor. He also pursued his interests in music and anthropology, which resulted in 1946 in a magisterial ethnomusicological study,
La Música en Cuba
, the first history of the mixed origins of Cuban music. He spent time in Venezuela and Haiti, the inspiration for his novel
The Kingdom of This World
, in whose introduction he laid out his theory of
lo real maravilloso
, the origins of “magical realism.” In 1959, after the Cuban Revolution, Carpentier moved back to his home country to serve in a number of official positions, including Director of the Cuban State Publishing House and Professor of the History of Culture at the University of Havana. In 1966, Carpentier returned to Paris as the Cuban cultural attaché and remained there until his death.

FRANCES PARTRIDGE
(1900–2004) was a member of the Bloomsbury group, a writer, and a translator from French and Spanish.

STANLEY CROUCH
is a novelist, essayist, and jazz critic whose books include
Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing
and
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker
.

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

I was by no means the only reader of books on board the
Neversink.
Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much
.

—
HERMAN MELVILLE,
WHITE JACKET

Reasons of State
is a magisterial novel that raises ideas and passions about time, seamlessly converting them into mythic fact. I first had my coat pulled about it by Enrique Fernandez, a low-keyed critic and writer who was then either in possession of or working on a doctorate. We met at
The Village
Voice
, headquartered in Manhattan, back during the time now thought of as the
Voice’s
good years, roughly three decades from the middle 1950s to its final period of occasional depth and quality, the 1980s. Even so, that is as dubious a description of a “counterculture” newspaper as “the good years” is of the Third Reich that Borges was not impressed by—long before the removed literary sect that this grand inquisitor of a world-class librarian
supposedly
represented, because Borges stood apart through his accurate awareness, his tendency to ongoing study, his rejection of simplemindedness. Way down yonder in Argentina, this was a man who clearly saw the blood on that tragically warlike and naive German entity led by an imperial Austrian who loved to savagely flash his pure white Aryan teeth.

Fernandez was not taken in by much of the
Voice
because he was not opposed to adulthood or growing up, but he was as responsible for this essay as any that I was lucky enough to hear as well as I could, during an influential and heated learning time, one in which intelligence, discernment, and any attempt to understand life through reading the best books was in a photo-finish with the adolescent drives that seem to permanently have a good chance to stand in the United States, either in its academy or in a homemade lynch mob, because of a confusion between overly or underrespecting the aristocracy and the common people.

This confusion is usually undisputed as a
version
of freedom. It can be defended as such while throwing eggs and rocks over the barricades, missiles that are supposed to be taken as the released birds of the revered leaders who had risen from the mud, purportedly glistening with blood and scars from their ennobling wounds: they were then floating, willy-nilly, atop the surge of hypnotic chaos indifferently threatening us all, worldwide. Call it what you would, those years were like a
return to the mad years following the fall of Louis and Marie Antoinette. Deep blues turned her hair gray, that last mile soiled by eruptions from her terrified stomach as she rolled in a cart on the Parisian thoroughfare not far from the guillotine. But the former immigrant queen was permitted, by her guards—obviously sympathetic servants of the people, and easily appreciated in the era of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers—to relieve herself against a wall.