Abstract
Along with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Heberto Padilla, and Edmundo Desnoes, Calvert Casey (1924–1969) formed part of the generation of Cuban writers and intellectuals who came into prominence with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. During those heady days of the early sixties, Casey was everywhere: hobnobbing with visiting writers, making the rounds of book exhibits and cocktail parties, contributing stories and essays to Lunes de Revolución and Casa de las Américas, and writing a couple of well-received books: El regreso (1962; expanded edition, 1963), a collection of stories; and Memorias de una isla (1964), a volume of essays. It was also during this period that Casey acquired the nickname of La Calvita [Baldie], a punning reference to his hairline and his homosexuality. But in 1965, during a trip to Poland, Casey decided not to return to Cuba, at least in part because of the Revolution’s hostility toward homosexuals. Eventually settling in Rome, a city that he thought of as a two-thousand-year-old Havana, he worked as a translator and continued to write stories. In 1967 Seix Barral published a third edition of El regreso and two years later a new volume of stories, Notas de un simulador, which turned out to be his last. In May of 1969, despondent over an unhappy love affair and anxious about the possibility that his visa might not be renewed, La Calvita committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
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Notes
Calvert Casey, Notas de un simulador, ed. Mario Merlino (Madrid: Montesinos, 1997)
Casey, The Collected Stories, ed. Ilán Stavans (Durham: Duke University Press. 1998).
Víctor Fowler, “El siglo XIX de Casey y el proyecto de Ciclón,” Unión 25 (1966): 14. See also Fowler’s perceptive reading of this story in Lamaldición: Una historia del placer como conquista (La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1998), 128–140.
Rafael Martínez Nadal, “Calvert Casey y notas a una lectura de ‘Piazza Margana’,” Quimera 26 (December 1982): 85.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, “¿Quién mató a Calvert Casey?” in Mea Cuba (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1992), 150.
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896; New York: Dover, 1955), p. 104.
Calvert Casey, Memorias de una isla (La Habana: Ediciones R, 1964), 90–91.
On the Revolution’s persecution of homosexuals, see Ian Lumsden, Machos, Maricones and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996)
Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal, Conducta Impropia (Madrid: Playor, 1984).
Andreu stayed in Cuba and eventually also took her own life. See Reinaldo Arenas, Antes que anochezca (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992), 160–161; also Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba, 144, 194.
John and Charles Wesley, The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Office, 1870), 7: 327.
Casey wrote to Cabrera Infante: “Aquí en Roma, todo deja de tener importancia; estoy más cerca de ese quietismo nirvanesco que tú tanto odias y yo tanto ansío. Tres semanas busqué por Madrid las obras del padre Mariana, el gran quietista español excomulgado por esa cocinera incansable que era Santa Teresa y su amiga o hermana San Juan de la Cruz, activistas insufribles” [Here in Rome everything loses its importance; I am closer to that nirvana-like quietism that you hate and that I long for. I spent three weeks in Madrid looking for the works of Father Mariana, the great Spanish quietist excommulgated by that tireless cook Saint Theresa and her friend or sister Saint John of the Cross, insufferable activists both] (May 15, 1967). Casey confuses Miguel de Molinos with the historian Juan de Mariana. For Casey’s interest in molinismo, see also Vicente Molina Foix, “En la muerte de Calvert Casey,” Insula 272–273 (julio-agosto 1969): 40
María Zambrano, “Calvert Casey, el indefenso,” Quimera 26 (diciembre 1982): 60.
George Steiner, Extraterritorial (New York: Penguin, 1971), 16.
Karl Vossler, The Spirit of Language in Civilization, trans. Oscar Oeser (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 123.
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© 2003 Gustavo Pérez Firmat
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Firmat, G.P. (2003). Mother’s Idiom, Father’s Tongue. In: Tongue Ties. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980922_5
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