Antonio Porchia: Man of few words

1. Burglary

One of the great burglaries in literary history occurred around 1960 in a suburb of Buenos Aires. Three men, strong-arm burglars, barged through Antonio Porchia’s front door, which was never locked. Porchia, who was about 75, greeted them as “friends.” He invited them to take what they wanted.

It was a humble house, a shed with four rooms, scrupulously neat. The burglars saw nothing of value. The men looked at the art on the walls. But the paintings were inscribed “to the poet” and “to the philosopher.”

“We cannot rob a philosopher,” one of the men said sadly.

Porchia had a little bread, cheese and salami in the house. He invited the men to sit and share it. They ate and talked with Porchia until 4 a.m., but they had to go back home while it was still dark.

2. ‘Friends’

Porchia lived in Olivos, a modest neighborhood 14 miles north of the city center. The house was painted brown, with a door dead center. It had a low-pitched tile roof.

Portia would have been wearing a pajama top and would have stumbled into his trousers. In my mind, he was wearing a yellow pajama jacket and gray slacks.

The paintings that the burglars inspected were by Quinquela Martin, Di Taranto, Lacomera and Victorica. The artists, unknown to the burglars, were among the founders of Impulso, an association that promoted arts and literature. Many members were anarchists.

Porchia never wrote this story. If he had, he would have objected that the story was not about a burglary but about friendship. We learn about ourselves through encounters with friends.

But Porchia didn’t write stories. He wrote aphorisms.

3. Discovery

Porchia showed how little a person needs to be a writer. He had little education. He had to work to support his extended family.

One of the remarkable features of his life is that almost all the details are cloudy. This much is fairly clear:

Porchia was born in 1886 in Italy. His father died, and his mother brought the family to Argentina when Antonio was about 25.

Antonio, the eldest son, had begun work as a basket weaver at 14. He assumed responsibility for supporting the family.

My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century.

It’s an unusual way of looking at a father’s death. But Porchia never married, never started his own family. He didn’t have the chance to do those grown-up things.

Antonio and his brothers worked as laborers. He worked at the port and then got a job in a print shop. He and his brothers eventually saved enough to buy a press and set up a business.

Antonio was frugal. He saved money for a house. His diet was simple. He had little clothing and preferred pajama tops to shirts.

But he allowed himself one luxury: writing. He thought about what he saw and read, and tried to distill his reflections into aphorisms, a record of lessons learned, ideas considered.

In 1943, at age 57, he published a collection under the title Voices.

When the books came from the bindery, Porchia stored them at Impulso’s offices in La Boca, a neighborhood near the port.

The books didn’t sell. When members complained they were in the way, Porchia gave the books to libraries.

In 1947, someone sent a copy to the French critic Roger Caillois, who is known for introducing South American writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, to French readers. Caillois had fled France in 1939 and had spent much of World War II in Argentina. After the war, Caillois reviewed and commented on books by South American writers for Sur magazine. He was scanning a new stack of new books when he saw Voices, which was humbly printed. Caillois read it cover to cover. He brought out a French translation. The book was translated and became known throughout Europe.

4. An interview

Porchia was interviewed by a literary magazine. He was asked about the title: Why “Voices”?

“Everything is heard,” he replied.

People think about art in various ways. Those ways tend to run together, as streams run together to form rivers, and we have two competing schools.

The first believes that art is made. Those who advocate for this view emphasize the struggle of the artist.

The second school believes that art is found or discovered by a person while he or she is living a life. An ordinary fellow like Porchia can live his life, reflect on it and write about it. A person can do all that if he or she is simply open to whatever ideas come up. 

Man goes nowhere. Everything comes to man, like tomorrow.

Where do those voices come from? It’s hard to say, but if you simply sit quietly and reflect long enough, you will hear them.

5. Controversy

One of the remarkable features of Portia’s life is the disagreement about the most basic facts.

You can find scholars who see Voices as a work of metaphysics, politics or literature. Others view it as poetry.

Some people are sure that Porchia himself sent a copy of Voices to Caillois. Others are not.

Some see Caillois as Porchia’s champion. Others see him as a patronizing snob. 

Some people say that Porchia saved money to buy his house. Others say one of his brothers handled his finances and bought a series of ever-smaller, cheaper houses for him as his money ran out.

When Porchia worked at the port, was he a porter or a clerk? You can find testimony for both. 

English readers usually find Porchia through a selection of aphorisms chosen and translated by the American poet W.S. Merwin. Scholars have argued over the merits of the book.

Why so much controversy over work that is notable, mainly, for its brevity?

Here’s one theory: If Porchia had been better educated, wealthier or of a high social standing, the facts of his life would have been better documented. Since he was a poor, common worker, few people paid attention.

There’s also this: A writer of aphorisms leaves a lot to the imagination.

James Geary, a connoisseur of the aphorism, said the aphorist’s impulse is to read, discuss, study and reflect — and then distill the product of reflection to a few words. The writer assumes the reader will go through a reverse process, that the aphorism is the start of a period of reflection.

You don’t read aphorisms for information, meaning you don’t read them quickly. You read aphorisms because they prompt you to start their own lines of thought. 

People have read a lot of things into Porchia’s work.

6. A life of its own

Porchia said the details of his life weren’t important. The aphorisms were what mattered.

I am not amiss anywhere, because I am nowhere to be found.

The aphorisms became a kind of common property after Porchia died and his name was no longer associated with them. Argentina, which has endured periods of authoritarian rule, underwent a reign of terror in the 1970s.

When students would enter classrooms in the morning, they would sometimes see sayings — unattributed to any writer — on the blackboard. The sayings were lines from Voices.

An imprisoned political prisoner, allowed to send a Christmas card to friends, sent lines from Voices, without reference to the author.

Love that is not all pain, is not all love.

It’s as if one writer’s voice had been taken up by others.

7. Mysteries & certainties

Writers, it seems, are especially prone to telling stories about themselves that are not literally true. These stories might have a grain of truth in them but are mythic. They are an explanation of something in the broadest sense — they ask the hearer to look at the teller in a different way.

Was Porchia’s father a former priest who had renounced his vows and started a family? Did the family have to move from town to town in Italy, facing the disapproval of the devout? Was this why the family was living on the margins of society?

Did Porchia fall in love with a prostitute? Did he find, later in life, a woman whom we wanted to marry? But did her “owner” threaten her over the relationship? Did they stop seeing each other out of fear?

You can find people who believe these stories are literally true and people who are convinced they are not.

So many things about Porchia’s life are uncertain, it’s easy to overlook the things that we know.

• He was content. Those who knew him agree that Porchia never expressed dissatisfaction with his lot. He didn’t resent having to work to support family members. He was satisfied with his little house, his modest diet.

• He was an extraordinary listener. People talked to him because they had the sense that he was listening carefully, paying attention, not missing a detail.

• He was humble. He was interested in the people and things around him. He was not just interested in himself.

All of this was so obvious that it could almost escape attention. After Porchia died in 1968, his friends said and wrote things about him. On these points, the the testimony is unanimous.

8. What kind of writer?

Porchia is important to three reasons.

• First, he showed that anyone can be a writer. If you are looking for the minimum of what it takes to be a writer, Porchia is a good place to start. Henry David Thoreau went to Walden to confront some essential business, to show that it took little to satisfy a person’s physical needs for food and shelter and that one needed little to do the work of thinking for oneself. Porchia was more minimal than the minimalists.

His lived simply, and he wrote simply. He said that thinking and writing are natural — something people do. A person eats when hungry and sleeps when tired. Writing is just an expression of another natural drive.

When I say what I say, it is because what I say has overcome me.

• Second, Porchia showed that you can write a book of your own in your own way.

I used to think that everyone should write such a book, a book that reflects your own thoughts and opinions, your own view of the world.

Michel de Montaigne showed the way with his Essays, written almost 450 years ago. He started small, trying to record his own ideas about some of the questions that human beings keep coming back to — what it means to get an education, to love, to live honorably and to die a good death. As he thought, he wrote. The book grew, question by question, topic by topic.

Walt Whitman’s wrote the same kind of personal book in poetry. Leaves of Grass began as a collection of 12 poems. It grew as Whitman grew. Each day, Whitman went out into the world and reported on what he saw. He wrote one book, and it grew with him.

This kind of book admits many forms. Montaigne wrote essays. Whitman wrote poems. Porchia wrote aphorisms.

The “voices” Porchia heard grew from a small collection in a notebook to more than 600. He edited and refined them as he went. Early aphorisms disappeared in later editions, replaced by a similar thought expressed more clearly, more concisely.

• Third, Porchia thought and wrote about the things most human beings think about.

Perhaps the most frequent theme is suffering, including grief. But the topic that strikes me is how a person, in observing life and in thinking about it, can sometimes lose a sense of self. It’s the sense that the separate individual is merging with the whole cosmos.

You will find the distance that separates you from them — by joining them.

It’s as if the burglars and the burgled are one.

Bibliography

Antonio Porchia, Voices, translated by W.S. Merwin, Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2003. For English readers, this is the place to start. The aphorisms quoted in this essay are from this edition.

James Geary, The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2006. This is a delightful quick tour. 

González Otero, A. (January - June 2014). Hermeneutics of the Void: Antonio Porchia and Expressive Brevity. The Word (24), 69 – 77.