Prizewinning author Oscar Hijuelos talks to Andrew Ladd about his new memoir, growing up in Harlem, and men’s struggle for identity.
Oscar Hijuelos was the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in 1990, for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love He’s also written seven other books, including one piece of young adult fiction, Dark Dude, and a relatively unknown first novel Our House in the Last World. His latest, Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir, is his first foray into memoir.
In the book’s first half Hijuelos describes his upbringing as the sickly child of Cuban immigrants in 1950s Harlem. (He contracted nephritis when he was four, probably during a visit to Cuba, and on returning to America had to spend almost a year in hospital.) The setup has potential, but Hijuelos admits he doesn’t retain many vivid memories of that period of his life, and as a consequence he mostly spins his wheels in the early chapters, stuck in a few muddy themes he tries to emphasize about his childhood.
Interesting though these are—because of that early year in an American hospital, for instance, his English ended up much better than his Spanish, which made it difficult to connect with his parents—the result is a lot of heavily qualified, parenthetical-within-parenthetical sentences, some of them an entire paragraph long (much like this sentence, if you need an example of what I mean), which is fine if you like that sort of thing, and many people do, but at times they do make the narrative move a little slowly.
Having made it through the first half, though, you’re rewarded with a nimble, snappy, and engrossing second half, where Hijuelos describes his early adulthood—first as a copywriter for a New York ad agency and then as an emerging author. His time at CUNY, rubbing shoulders with the giants of mid-twentieth century literature, is particularly fascinating if you’re a literature buff yourself, but the book really takes off when he moves to Italy. There he begins working haphazardly on Mambo Kings, but mostly just grows up and figures himself out, and the story of his doing so is unputdownable.
Indeed, I was disappointed when I eventually reached the last page—and glad to get a little more of Oscar when he agreed to speak with me on the phone last month, about writing, his father, and young men’s struggle to find an identity. The transcript of our conversation appears below, edited for length, clarity, and organization.
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Good Men Project: Thoughts Without Cigarettes starts when you’re very young, and ends with you winning the Pulitzer for Mambo Kings. What were your reasons for choosing to start and end at these two points?
Oscar Hijuelos: I think the first part of the book is really about losses, and then I guess you could say one of the themes is converting those losses into something positive. One of the beautiful things about literature is that you can take disparate energies and transform them into something good. My loss—my relative loss—of Spanish, as a kid, ended up becoming a very positive asset in terms of rediscovering that world through my writing.
Also, the story told in the first part of the book has a lot to do with my first novel, Our House and the Last World. Very few people know that book, and so I wanted to tell that story in a more direct way, and at the same time replicate some of the novelistic textures of that first book.
GMP: So was that first novel really the story of you and your upbringing, to some extent?
OH: In a sense, yeah. Our House was a very—it’s a rougher book in some ways, it’s more direct in some ways, it’s less expansive in terms of fiction. And after that intimacy I found I could explore a different aspect of my personality—my love of music and Cuban culture and so forth—through Mambo Kings. But it was two sides of the same story, in a way: the same energies that informed Our House ended up providing the creative fuel for Mambo Kings. And I found the writing of Mambo Kings very liberating. One of the reasons is that I really didn’t think anyone would publish it!
GMP: It’s interesting that you say Mambo Kings was more liberating, because from your memoir it seems like you felt more liberated while you were writing it, being in Italy.
OH: Yeah, and being in Italy I could put myself in my parents’ place, and their generation’s place—you know? I kind of learned the language, but even then a lot of times I felt the same way my folks must have: my father coming to New York in the forties—maybe he knew some English, I don’t know, I doubt it—and finding himself in a new culture. So it was good for me in terms of giving me insight into what my folks went through.
GMP: Since you mentioned your parents, I wanted to ask about your father, who’s an important presence in this book, and who was clearly an important presence in your life. I was wondering if you could talk about your relationship with him briefly—how you thought it was when you were younger, and how it developed?
OH: Well, he passed away when I was eighteen, so I never had much chance to know him. But what I knew of him I really liked a lot, and of course loved. He was a sort of soft-spoken gent, a very nice human being—if he was ever around crying babies, just his presence would quiet them down. He had a very kindly center. He was very decent in his value system. You know, his nickname was “charity,” because he was always so giving to others. I don’t think he had any enemies that I know of, male or female. I think his biggest enemy was himself when he was overly harsh about his life.
However, he had his flaws. I think various things that happened in his personal life, like losing his older brother, and being separated from Cuba—by choice at first but later, because of the revolution, by necessity—really threw him. He always had a melancholic core that I sensed when I was a kid. And he could only cope with it in certain ways, so he drank too much sometimes.
But he wasn’t a cruel person, just the sort that would get down on himself. I don’t know how much of that comes through in the memoir, but he was basically a good guy and I always felt that his life had a tragic trajectory.
GMP: It’s interesting that you say he was soft-spoken and very calming, and things like that. I was wondering if you ever saw any kind of machismo in him alongside that? There’s a section in the book where you talk about how your brother saw you getting hassled by two guys on the street, and told you that the next time they came by you had to beat them up—and you did. Did that kind of “toughness” come from your dad?
OH: That was really just a memory that stood in my mind as being this moment when I crossed over into participation in the real world. You need to assert yourself, occasionally, because people can be very cruel, and mean-hearted, for no other reason than they just feel like it. Some people get off on being mean. But I don’t recall my father having been cruel to anyone, at least not on purpose.
GMP: What about his approach to women? Was that soft-spoken and gentlemanly, too?
OH: No, well… I had a godfather who was gay, and it took me years to realize that he was quite, uh, different from my father. But one day it really landed on me, because we were walking down the street, my godfather and my father, and this really shapely woman walked by and my father did this take on her—and then a nice-looking guy walked by and my godfather did the same!
But I would say that the sort of expanded machista thing I dwell on in Mambo Kings, where the guy’s a womanizer and all that, I think that’s based partly on the fact that my father definitely liked women, and there was always this family myth was that he fooled around a lot, although I never saw it myself.
On the other hand, in terms of my fiction, this whole obsession with maleness and sexual prowess really came down to a way of reflecting on the human body as being this vehicle, to use a Buddhist term, that basically passes with time. So if it seems to be about a macho stereotype at times, it’s really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or vice versa, because in fact what I wanted to do was make the book a meditation on the futility of physical vanity.
But culturally speaking I don’t recall that my father was at all sexist… He did like being around women. I guess a lot of folks are like that.
GMP: You mention in the book that, though all the interviews you did for Mambo Kings stoked your ego, you usually didn’t enjoy doing them. So what’s one question that I could ask you, to finish up with, that you would enjoy being asked?
OH: I guess the question I would like to be asked is… Do I feel that my writing might have value for youngsters today? Thoughts Without Cigarettes is the kind of book I wish I could have read when I was a kid, because it points out how circumstance can define your life, and that you shouldn’t get too hard or down on yourself.
Because I guess I still see myself—even though I’m generations apart—as having an affinity with the new Latinos in this country. There are millions of kids out there who are wondering about their identities, and maybe some part of them—because of the media, or because of what’s hip now, or because of what they perceive from the internet or whatever their means of seeing the world is—can be down on themselves, because of how Latinos are sometimes talked about, particularly with immigration issues and all that.
So the question I would like to be asked is, do I feel that my book would have value for kids trying to find themselves in terms of their own identity and how they fit in. And I would hope the answer would be yes.
— photo by Dario Acosta