Writer and renovator of the Argentine journalistic style, member of the Buenos Aires bohemia of his time, Enrique González Tuñón had the virtue of bringing the Buenos Aires suburbs to the center of the city through his chronicles and of making public the dispute between the literary groups of Boedo and Florida from the pages of the newspaper Crítica, in a Buenos Aires where he was born 120 years ago, on March 10.
Created in Argentina due to European influence, the Florida and Boedo groups were part of the Argentine avant-garde literary scene and were emblematic of the ideological and stylistic disputes that underlay both sectors. With a more conservative ideology, Jorge Luis Borges, Victoria Ocampo and Leopoldo Marechal, among others, belonged to the former, and their meeting point was the magazine Martín Fierro. The Boedo group, made up of Leónidas Barletta, Roberto Arlt, Álvaro Yunque and César Tiempo, represented a work related to social, working class and political issues from a socialist or leftist perspective.
González Tuñón participated with his brother, Raúl, in these groups, collaborated for the magazines Martín Fierro and Proa, and in 1924, he adhered to the Florida movement, collaborating in the legendary newspaper Martín Fierro, in Ricardo Güiraldes' magazine Proa. There the writer published his remarkable images of "Brújula de Bolsillo", and in the newspaper, his epitaphs were the most scathing during the literary guerrilla.
In the pages of that newspaper, between June 1925 and August 1931, the writer also wrote texts that he would later compile in his first book, which was published under the name of "Tangos" (1926).
González Tuñón took each week the lyrics of a tango as an inspirational motif and, giving free rein to his imagination, wrote a story about the story contained in the lyrics of a tango that was popular at the time, which was accompanied by an illustration.
However, his most successful work was surely "Camas desde un peso" (1932), an intergenre piece between the novel and the short story integrated by a series of stories, Dostoievskian and poetic, a gallery of portraits of the miserable underworld of Buenos Aires, where five men of dubious appearance share a room in a place called "El puchero misterioso" (The mysterious pot).
"El alma de las cosas inanimadas" (1927) and "La rueda del molino mal pintado" (1928) are some of the vignettes published in newspapers.
"Apología del hombre santo" (1930) is a tribute to the memory of Ricardo Güiraldes. "El Tirano" (1932), subtitled "South American novel of honest customs and just liberalities", is a satire to Uriburu's dictatorship. His last books, a compilation of his journalistic work, are "Las sombras y la lombriz solitaria" (1933), a series of journalistic-literary impacts with a predominance of critical expressionism; "El cielo está lejos" (1933) and "La calle de los sueños perdidos" (1941).
González Tuñón was also a film scriptwriter ("Mañana me suicido", 1942; "Pasión imposible", 1943), wrote tangos (including "Pa'l cambalache", written with Rafael Rossi and recorded in 1929 by Carlos Gardel), plays, sainetes and folletines.
Born in the neighborhood of Once, today Balvanera, the writer spent part of his childhood walking and reading among the trees of Miserere square, which at that time was "a real park, wooded, dense" as his brother Raul, one of the great poets of the Argentine avant-garde, would recall after his death.
"He was 10 years old, he was four years older than me. I followed him and admired him. Once, evoking that time, he confessed to me, desolate, that I was annoying him back then. Maybe, but already when I joined Crítica newspaper after him -an exciting stage, an extraordinary journalistic phenomenon, something decidedly unsurpassed- we seemed to be one single person, we agreed on everything. From then on he stimulated me, he helped me, even from afar and until his last breath", he once evoked.
His brother also recalled that the writer "read avidly and disorderly" and "often quoted Quevedo, the one of El buscón, Dickens, Chekhov, Bret Harte, Gorki, Payró of El casamiento de Laucha, and Ángel Ganivet, Lord Dunsany, Charles Louis Philippe, Rafael Barret, Katherine Mansfield, Zola". He was the first to incorporate words and sayings from the pop slang of the 20s and not only in the glosses of tangos, and defined him as "the master chronicler of the city".
"Enrique often displayed subtle irony, sharp and in some cases stinging wit. This man so fine, so thin, so kindly was implacable when it came to whip a scoundrel or a hypocritical pacato. He alternated an effusive cordiality and his communicating tenderness with a zumbona grace in the after-dinner conversations, at times with traits of black humor", says Raúl González Tuñón.
"I am sure that one day, on the wall of the house in the neighborhood where we were born, or rather, on the wall of an ugly building without history that now stands there, without the patio, without the medlar tree, you can read these words engraved in bronze: On this site was located the childhood home of Enrique González Tuñón, the most porteño of the chroniclers of Buenos Aires. He left for an unknown area on May 9, 1943. He was not a general, he was not a prime minister, but he was an artist, he was a poet, he had the key to the street".
SOURCE: Télam