Persona gratissima: Jorge Edwards, Chilean writer and ex-diplomat, talks about his experience bridging contradictory worlds.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

IN DECEMBER, 1970, the Allende government sent Jorge Edwards, a career diplomat, to open a Chilean Embassy in Havana. In spite of the official nature of his relations with the Castro government, Edwards maintained contact with outspoken dissident Cuban intellectuals, including Jose Lezama Lima, Heberto Padilla, and Pablo Armando Fernandez. Soon he became acutely aware of the underside of the Cuban Revolution, idealized by Boom writers such as Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a model for future Latin American political action, but portrayed by Cuban dissenters as brutal and tyrannical, especially in its treatment of non-conformist artists. In 1973, after retiring from the Diplomatic Corps, Edwards wrote Persona non grata, a searing indictment of the Castro regime with serious implications for other authoritarian governments, including that of Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in Chile in September of that same year.

The book, which was attacked by extremists of the right and left, launched Edwards' literary career. Although he had been writing for years, he now became one of the most widely read Chilean authors, an international celebrity. Other books followed, among them Desde la cola del dragon (From the Dragon's Tail) (1977), a collection of essays on Chilean culture and politics; Los convidados de piedra (The Stone Guests) (1977), a political novel; El museo de cera (The Wax Museum) (1981), a fantastic novel; Adios, poeta (Good-by, Poet) (1990), a memoir about his experiences with Pablo Neruda; and a recently published collection of short stories.

Jorge Edwards, who is currently a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., is a charming, courtly, soft-spoken man, whose perfect manners reflect the years he spent in the Diplomatic Corps. But in spite of his reserve, he exudes warmth and good humor. He is forthright and surprisingly candid, telling his story without self-aggrandizement or false modesty and laughing at the embarrassing or frustrating episodes.

Although he denies that he is from a literary family, he recognizes that he received a great deal of intellectual stimulation as a child. His mother was an avid reader. "She didn't write," he says, "but she read in French, Spanish and English. I'm sure I inherited my literary inclinations from her. I was a voracious reader as a little boy and one day I just found myself writing, I don't remember how." His first efforts were published when he was about eleven in the magazine of San Ignacio School, the Jesuit college where he studied in Santiago.

"I always wrote," he says, "but I never thought I would be a professional writer because that just wasn't foreseeable in the Chile in which I began to work and write. And that, in a way, determined my attitude toward writing." Writing was not considered a real profession, but a leisure or secondary activity. And so, Jorge Edwards became a diplomat. There have been other major writers in the Edwards family, for example, the early twentieth-century realist, Joaquin Edwards Bello and Alberto Edwards, the essayist. Joaquin, his father's first cousin, was an important writer, but, according to Edwards, he was estranged from the family. "Becoming a writer distanced him. His first novel was called The Useless One. The funny thing is, he was called the 'useless one' in the family." When asked if his family finally learned to accept him, Edwards laughs, "My parents were scandalized when I started to write. Later, when I would win some literary prize or recognition, they were very proud."

Jorge Edwards entered the Diplomatic Corps toward the end of the 1950s, convinced that he would be able to pursue diplomatic and literary careers at the same time. "You know," he explains, "Chile had a tradition of writers in the Foreign Service . . . Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Salvador Reyes had been in the Corps . . . Humberto Diaz-Casanueva served during my time . . . Salvador was still serving during my time . . . So I thought that this would be a way of earning a living and writing at the same time . . . and of seeing the world, too. But I found that writing in the Diplomatic Corps was more difficult than I thought. Besides the office work, there was the matter of cocktail parties, social engagements, trips to the airport . . . When I was in Paris later on, between '62 and '67, as Embassy Secretary, what I got to know best was the airport. But I still managed to go to the Sorbonne and take classes with Roland Barthes. I met Mario Vargas Llosa before he published The Time of the Hero and I knew Julio Cortazar when he had only published a collection of stories. I got in on the beginning of the whole Boom movement, but, of course, I had to maintain a certain distance, because I had my duties at the Embassy and all that. So I was observing the whole Boom phenomenon, but without participating in it, really. I was sort of a clandestine writer in those days. I started to write more openly and to participate in the literary scene when I left the Diplomatic Corps and published Persona non grata at the end of 1973, when I was over forty. So I was a late bloomer."

Persona non grata was a new kind of endeavor for Edwards, who until then, had written only fiction. "I was a novelist and a short story writer," he points out. "I was writing Los convidados de piedra when I had the experience in Cuba that led me to write Persona non grata. I interrupted my work as a writer to do something that seemed to me to be pressing and necessary, on a personal as well as a professional level. Toward the end of 1970 I was charged with opening the Embassy of Chile in Havana for the Allende government. The assignment fell to me because at that time Chile couldn't send an...