Chaste Susanna was a notable man and not just because of his shipwreck, not even for being the face on the 5000 peso bill, but for being Colombia’s best poet, and thoroughly disliked. Recent Colombian lit, I’ll give you, owes a debt to He of Macondo, but all that celebrity has nothing on Casta Susana, alias Casto José, alias José Asunción Silva, who, aside from his lasting artistic influence, is the only great writer in history to have run a furniture shop on the side.
Think of the poet laureate, and when she ever owned a DFS. Or the last time Baudelaire capsized. That’s the problem with poets, though – all that glamorous tragedy and the writing itself gets lost. A little more literarily, Silva published three books in his thirty-year life, two of which were verse, one having the sonnet Nocturno, which you can see printed by Susanna’s bearded face on Colombian tender - even if the man himself was broke. Some people look as if they grow their beard and others look like they grow from it; our Susanna’s in the latter camp, with his banknote face a mark of the esteem Colombia holds him in.
When you’re as handsome as José your mates aren’t really your mates, and without even the aid of Facebook messenger, they spread rumours about his virility, whispered he fancied his sister, and while the veracity of both stories is probably, like, that they were true, it wasn’t very nice. Silva’s novel De Sobremesa, by coincidence, was written as a slight on his contemporaries, where artistic sensibility is put through the washing machine; where heterosexuality is as stable as the average heterosexual relationship; where travel through Europe, a crucial rite for Latin American yuppies, is sent up as a jolly holiday. The lit-scene, shockingly, rejected the novel, which has been off the canon since. Only now, in the midst of European financial collapse, are scholars getting down to the real business of reviving turn-of-the-century texts, and De Sobremesa’s reputation seems likely to be established as a key precursor to the Boom.
Forgetting the recent prestige, José had a rubbish time of it. Spanish has assonance coming out of its ears, which made not only for the source of Silva’s rhyme, but for his nicknames. It’s too easy to turn ‘Asunción’ into ‘pretensión’, or to mess around with ‘casto’ - an allusion to Silva’s suspected homosexuality. Slander followed Silva through his adulthood, this before losing his manuscripts in the aforementioned shipwreck. Those manuscripts were, of course, priceless; in 2015 because interest in Silva has peaked, and in 1895 because nobody would pay for them.
Equally lauded and mocked, Silva shot himself at a dinner party in 1896. In the century or so since his death, he has been recognised along with Martí and Darío as founding figures in the modernismo movement; Him from Cien Años even wrote the preface to the 1996 edition of De Sobremesa. And there’s a nice circularity to Colombia’s great authors helping one another out, even, or especially, when they’re out of fashion, and stuck with a terrible nickname.
