Letter From The Editor January - Brief Article - Editorial

Interview, Jan-April, 2001

"In New York I once dreamed I could fly," wrote Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls, his memoir that was published in 1993, a few years after he killed himself at the age of forty-seven. When one reads his extraordinary work, some of it written in his homeland, Cuba, where he was sent to prison in the early '70s (after being convicted of "ideological deviation" by Castro's government and accused of publishing abroad without official approval), one realizes that Arenas did fly--through his art. His writing is so exquisitely evocative and truthful and free ifs as though his words have wings that could take him--artistically, sexually, and even politically--anywhere on a physical or emotional level.

Now that Arenas is gone, his words can transport us to a life that's worth knowing about. As sentimental as it sounds, his is a story that is all about the beauty of truth. It's also about courage, and repression, and tyranny, and censorship, and humor, and sex, and friendship, and tragedy, and loss. We can witness this story through the body of writing that Arenas accomplished, much of it under hellish circumstances, but also in a film that just opened, Before Night Falls, starring Javier Bardem, who is on our cover this month, and whose feature and interview by Dennis Hopper begins on page 60. In the film, which is directed by artist Julian Schnabel, Bardem does such a fine job of embodying Arenas that, to me, it's as though both men are on our cover.

I never met Arenas, but our paths might have crossed, since we moved in some of the same circles in New York in the '80s. After being subjected to all sorts of horrifying inhumanities under Castro's rule, due to the fact that he was not only a writer but an openly declared homosexual, Arenas finally made it to America in 1980; he was one of more than 100,000 Cubans to arrive in the Mariel boat lift. By all accounts, life in New York City was both a relief for him, and more lonely than he expected; for instance, what he had to say was not always welcome in the literary circles which gather here. But he wrote a lot and was published by a variety of houses all over the world.

Then the writing stopped, when Arenas committed suicide in 1990. The question might be: How could someone with such an obvious life force end it? Arenas had been fighting a battle with AIDS, and losing it. In his introduction to Before Night Falls, which was published posthumously to great critical acclaim, Arenas wrote: "I really cannot say that I want to die; yet I believe that when the alternative is suffering and pain without hope, death is a thousand times better...In Cuba I endured a thousand adversities because the hope of escaping and the possibility of saving my manuscripts gave me strength. At this point, the only escape for me was death." It was relatively early in the AIDS epidemic--before the discoveries and treatments that now offer so many who benefit from them not only hope and health, but a full active life.

As we were working on this story, one of our team, Patrick Giles, who is an associate editor at Interview, remembered that he'd occasionally run into Arenas in New York in the late '80s, and that they'd known each other slightly. Giles told me: "Near the end of his life I was working at an AIDS organization, and I again saw him around, at meetings at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. He was already very ill. His death was one of a wave in a relentless tide of creative voices dragged from us. It was a time when we would say to each other, 'Who died last night?'"

It so happens that Giles is also responsible for a feature interview this month--Jazz, which begins on page 48. When we were talking, he made a point about the connection between the Cuban writer's lifestyle and art, and the history of jazz: "When I think of Arenas's work, I do so in the same way in which I think of jazz. Jazz is the result of America's greatest crises--liberty and identity--producing from their continuing crashes over the century the greatest music we've ever made. Jazz is perhaps the music of witness. Arenas was a writer of witness. The greatest art tells us what we need to know--how unjust people can be to each other, or how they can be full of misunderstanding, or mercy. It's something to remember--how such personal and collective human misery can nonetheless produce words, pictures, or music of such astonishing grace." It is the grace that we celebrate in this issue, the first of the new year.

INGRID SISCHY