How Castro’s courtier one day wound up holding bouquets for Bolsonaro is one of the literary world’s more intriguing stories, though it is by no means sui generis. It is one of those commonplaces of life that ageing is often accompanied by a Rightward drift. Writers, especially, have proven susceptible to such migrations across the spectrum. Writing up the journey — some riff on “why I left the Left” — has been an occupational hazard. Think André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, or any of the copycats who produced their own cut-price version of The God That Failed.
In their memoirs, almost all of which read like giddy schoolboy confessions, the accent has always lain on personal experience, but what they describe is in fact a broader social change. “You’re not special,” they make one want to scribble in the margins. Indeed, the move from Left to Right is, in a nutshell, the story of the 20th century. It may well be an iron law of history that no society emerged more Left-wing from it. The change in meaning of the words “social democracy” is a reliable index of this world-historical shift: in the first third of the century, a social democrat was practically a communist; in the second, something of a Keynesian; in the final third, a brazen Blairite.
What sets apart Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel-winning novelist who died on Sunday, aged 89, from his Left-leaving peers is the completeness of his transformation. While he shared some vestigial commitment to democracy and equality — both of a piece with the general repertoire of Cold War liberalism — for most of his post-conversion life, he began to rapidly slough off these wimpy beliefs towards the end of his days. By then he was a poster-boy of the hard Right.
In his youth, Left sympathies came naturally to Vargas Llosa. While he was a member of the mezzanine class, an untypical upbringing in Arequipa, Peru precluded any simple identification with the bourgeoisie. His father was a martinet, who abandoned young Mario and his mother, only to brutally reinstate himself 10 years later. The return was not a happy one. A macho type, Mario’s father had him sent off to a military academy to become a man; the son’s bookishness apparently was taken as “proof of homosexuality”. The experience left him scarred and hostile to all manner of authority, parental and state included. Democratic Marxism, rejecting both the patriarchal family and military authoritarianism, was of obvious appeal.
A trio of novels followed, cementing his reputation as a communist writer of promise in Lima’s Left circles. Their presiding spirit appears to be the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who welded the class struggle with indigenous millenarianism. Vargas Llosa’s debut, The Time of the Hero (1963), took aim at the military academy, depicting a dark world of racism and casual violence. In it, the scions of the ruling class murder a hapless cadet and gang-rape a chicken. The book enjoyed a succès de scandale when Peruvian nationalists burned it as a work of Ecuadorian propaganda; the two countries had fought a war in the Forties, and any domestic criticism in Lima was taken to be malicious disinformation emanating from Quito. The Green House (1966), too, served up a small fresco, this time taking in a worm’s-eye view of the Church, military, and political class during the dictatorship of the US-backed Manuel Odría from the bowels of a brothel. Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) complicated that picture with an upstairs-downstairs dynamic worthy of Joseph Losey; the title was a misnomer, referring to a bar-brothel of that name, where an upper-class hack converses a chauffeur. Along the way, Vargas Llosa bitingly takes in the snobbery and corruption of Lima’s rulers.
The Seventies saw Vargas Llosa turn his back on communism, though this was no Damascene conversion. Events chipped away at his beliefs. The twin shocks of 1956 — the Suez Crisis and Hungarian Uprising — had birthed a generation of Western Leftists who swore by “neither Washington nor Moscow”. Something similar transpired in Latin America in the mid- and late-Sixties. Thanks to the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 and the Brazilian military coup d’état with American support three years later, identification with the US had never been a realistic option for any self-respecting Latin American. Vargas Llosa, for one, had cheered Castro, for standing up to the gringo coup-makers.
Equally, there were reasons for disillusionment with communism. When Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968, Vargas Llosa became convinced that here was another imperial power, only one which flew a red flag. The priggish censorship of the sex scenes in his debut novel by La Joven Guardia, his Russian publisher, likewise confirmed the impression that the Soviets weren’t exactly free speech crusaders. To Vargas Llosa, they were no different from Franco’s blue pencillers, who had scrubbed unflattering references to authoritarianism from the Spanish edition. Castro’s support for the crushing of the Prague Spring was another blow. The final straw was the humbling of the Cuban poet Heberto Juan Padilla, who had to grovel before Castro for his “Right deviation”. Padilla’s eventual arrest in 1971 made a mockery of Castro’s claim to represent some kind of happy medium, reconciling state ownership and intellectual freedom.
The ideological quandary, the erasure of old certitudes, must have been difficult to process. Vargas Llosa busied himself with two comic turns, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), the latter on which his Western reputation stands. A work of autofiction with baroque touches of Iris Murdoch, it sends up his liaison with his vivacious and ribald Bolivian aunt, Julia Urquidi, 13 years his senior. “To have an affair with an older woman was very exciting,” Vargas Llosa later said. No doubt it was, for it appears to have equipped the 19-year-old with the precociousness that typically comes from such entanglements. He emerged from the affair a prose stylist with enormous reserves of sensitivity — literary assets that would for long allow him to get a free pass from the press, no matter how odious his politics became.
Thereafter, his writings took an overt political turn. A pivotal episode was an English encounter — a dinner party in 1980 attended by Margaret Thatcher, Philip Larkin, and Isaiah Berlin. By then, Vargas Llosa was already an Anglophile, having taught Latin American literature at KCL. Now, he reinvented himself as a tribune of “Andean Thatcherism” — his words. Reading Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Adam Smith, and Berlin — lodestars he later eulogised in The Call of the Tribe (2018) — he developed a deeply English scepticism of utopianism. Perfectibility was the creed of fools, he argued. Man’s fallibility demanded realism. Accordingly, he would never have any truck with magical realism, which he would equate with pie-in-the-sky utopian socialism. He was on to something: the doyens and doyennes of magical realism — the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Isabel Allende — were all unreconstructed Leftists. Vargas Llosa, however, was cut from a different cloth. Even his early communism had been a practical, nuts-and-bolts affair, no dreamy exercise in worldmaking. “I have an invincible weakness for so-called realism,” he would declare in his memoir A Fish in the Water (1993). A decade later, he had this to say to The Guardian: “that idea of a perfect society lies behind monsters like the Taliban.” Thus, with a single invidious comparison, he discarded any association with the Left.
“Even his early communism had been a practical, nuts-and-bolts affair, no dreamy exercise in worldmaking.”
The new embrace of neoliberalism rested on a casuistic logic. In his discussions of the Left, it was always its actually existing deficiencies that Vargas Llosa paraded before his readers: curbs on free speech, arbitrary arrest, and so on. Neoliberalism, by contrast, was an entirely theoretic possibility for him. Vargas Llosa spoke of the free market and free speech as belonging to a single package. It’s a quaint view, given how rarely the two have gone hand in hand in the Latin American setting. More often than not, elections there have pitched markets against democracy, the former usually with foreign (read: US) and military backing, the latter defended by the socialist Left.
Tellingly, Vargas Llosa praised Pinochet’s dictatorship for his dalliance with the Chicago Boys but upbraided him for violent suppression of labour and civil society — all without pausing to consider that Chile’s neoliberal growth had precisely been made possible by violence against the unions and wage suppression. Likewise, there was no reckoning with the practice of Anglo-American neoliberalism — reliant on an ever-expanding warfare state, public contracts, coups d’état, and prison labour. In later years, as a columnist for El País, he would pillory Leftist intellectuals for their economic illiteracy, though, on the strength of his own economic writings, the charge could easily be reversed.
A collaboration with the economist Hernando de Soto, Peru’s Hayek, resulted in a pamphlet calling for the transfer of property rights to the poor, who, with adequate credit, were to set about forming petit-bourgeois businesses. The magic bullet theory, however, failed to account for the fact that Peru’s problems were structural — that overnight, an exporter of raw materials could hardly rival the Asian Tigers, all of which had benefitted from colossal state intervention. Indeed, it was only in the absence of state intervention that Peru brought about its worst nightmare. When, in 1980, the newly elected Fernando Belaúnde abandoned the land reforms of the previous government, he effectively set the stage for Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist militia that murdered some 30,000 people in the Eighties.
In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for president on a neoliberal ticket — austerity, privatisation — losing to Alberto Fujimori in the second round. Still, it could be said that he won the argument. In the “Fujishock” that followed, the very same slate of reforms Vargas Llosa ran on were implemented by his opponent.
In the new millennium, especially after his 2010 Nobel Prize, Vargas Llosa became progressively unhinged. In 2022, he threw his weight behind Dina Boluarte, Peru’s unelected president, and cheered her suppression of students and indigenous groups. The following year, he came out in support for Bolsonaro, whose “clowning around” — as Vargas Llosa put it — included conspiring in a failed far-Right coup against Lula. In Chile, too, the novelist bet on the wrong horse, praising José Antonio Kast (who opposes gay marriage and abortion rights) who went on to lose to the Leftist Gabriel Boric. More risibly, apropos of #MeToo, Vargas Llosa dubbed feminism “the staunchest enemy of literature”. A potential Podemos victory heralded a “return to caudillismo”.
The penchant for outré pronouncements revealed a man utterly out of his depth. Luckily for him, his reputation in the world of belles lettres rests not so much on his political forays as his high-minded erotica and formidable command of literary history. Happily, there coexisted two Vargas Llosas, the one a columnist and the other a novelist. His authoritarian neoliberalism scarcely intruded on his later fiction, and it takes a magnifying glass to detect minute traces of it in, say, The Feast of the Goat (2000) or The Dream of the Celt (2010). The Vargas Llosa that will be remembered is the playful chap who whispered “Henry James is shit” to his friend José Donoso on the latter’s deathbed, to which came the reply: “Flaubert, more so.” As a fan of Flaubert’s, Vargas Llosa no doubt would recognise that his tired shilling for autocratic and neoliberal shibboleths wouldn’t have been out of place in the master’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues.
