Nonfiction Corner: She Found Bounties in Small Towns, Local Talk and Everyday Life

Dwight Garner

Rebecca West, in an elegy for D.H. Lawrence, recalled that when he arrived in a new city, he would race from the rail station to his hotel room and “immediately sit down and hammer out articles about the place, vehemently and exhaustively describing the temperament of the people.” The Argentinian writer Hebe Uhart (1936-2018) was the anti-Lawrence. Time goes more slowly in unfamiliar places, and her travel writing expresses that measured and elongated quality. She had sensitivity and restraint and a wonderful sense of the absurd. She did not reach for Lawrencian pronunciamentos, and she would not be hurried.

Uhart is well known in Argentina, where during her lifetime she published two novels, several books of short stories and works of nonfiction. These volumes are only beginning to be issued in English, by the indefatigable nonprofit publisher Archipelago Books. Her work has appeared recently in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Many of Uhart’s fans, like many of Joan Didion’s, prize her crónicas — her essays, articles and travel writing — more than her fiction.

A selection of these crónicas is available now in English under the title “A Question of Belonging.” They’ve been translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner, who lends them a sophisticated informality. Uhart was not wealthy. She traveled on the cheap, mostly in South America, by bus or rail. She liked to window shop. She tended to avoid large cities, preferring small towns.

She was a flaneur, a student of the world. She would perambulate an area and then sit in a cafe and observe. A typical comment in her work is, “It was strange to read Barthes in a place where pigs were running around as they pleased.” One of the core messages George Orwell imparted to other critics and essayists, Paul Fussell wrote, is that they “should read everything all the time — labels, signs, pamphlets, corporate reports, college catalogs, poems, novels, plays, ‘nonfiction,’ press releases — the lot.” Humanity expresses itself in many written forms.

Uhart read in this insatiable manner. She noticed, in a local paper, that a soccer match was “postponed due to a wasp invasion.” In one newspaper’s literary section, a reader had sent in an ode to his eyeglasses. She noted that it ended: “Little lens, I love you so!” She collected other forms of language. Residents of Tapalqué, Argentina, were known to have a knack for colorful descriptions and gentle insults. She spent time tracking these down. One example: When someone not known for their wit said something interesting, a local might wryly observe, “My dog caught a fly.”

Uhart’s time in Tapalqué was representative of her travel writing in other ways. She got off the bus there, asked for a nearby hotel and was told there was none. A moment later, someone said, “You can stay at Mary’s house.” When Mary turned out to be out of town, someone added, “Then you could go to Lola’s instead.” She was a seeker of this sort of communal feeling. She liked the town of Cañuelas because “if someone has a pool, you take a dip, if someone’s barbecued a lamb and has leftovers, you’re offered a large portion without a second thought.” She relished life’s daily potluck.

Uhart was seemingly indifferent to creature comforts. She attended literary festivals and was taken to elite restaurants. She would make sure to go to a seedy dive bar beforehand for coffee, she wrote, as if to carbon-offset the bourgeois gluttony.

This is a slim and modest book, one that will not set off a panic at the Barnes & Noble sales counter. But once you are attuned to its frequencies, the pleasures keep coming. In one essay, she contrasts the spending habits and home décor of three types of families: progressives, Peronists — followers of the populist president Juan Perón — and descendants of communist resistance fighters.

Progressives never flaunt their wealth; conspicuous consumption is considered ill-mannered. The new-money Peronists have no such inhibitions: If a member of the family has a craving for hot chocolate at four in the morning, or spends all of their savings on meeting Mickey Mouse in Disneyland, or shoots down loquats with a gun, the other family members will not openly disapprove, because they are not inclined to make value judgments — they are not constrained by the Platonic Form of the Good.

The descendants of the resistance fighters are similar, in terms of their understated good taste, to the progressives. I smiled at Uhart’s observation about the way they cling to their grandfather’s old books, not even dusting them because “it would be like feather dusting Grandfather.” Uhart adds: “They flaunt a new book as a Peronist would flaunt a new car.”

A few of these pieces were reported when Uhart was in her 70s. In one, she wrote about taking a bad fall, “catching myself on my wrists, knees and nose, which bled a little, leaving me with a bloody mustache and some other bloody spots on my forehead and below the eye.” She was left with a limp that did not slow her down. She was a floating cork, one that would not be pushed under.

In one late-life essay, she was in the I.C.U. of a small hospital. Beside her, two machines conversed: “One says ‘dum, dum’ and the other ‘piff.’” She was visited by a former student named Coca. Uhart told Coca that she was embarrassed to be seen by her “with my ass to the wind.” The small, earthy moment glows: “We all have asses, Hebe,” she replied soberly.

It was a Socratic truth, the moment when Socrates grasps for universal consensus before continuing his argument. Indeed, Socrates, we all have asses. During one bus trip, she made conversation with the driver and a passenger next to her. She was keen to add to the conviviality. At one point she remarked, in a line that perfectly captured her attitude toward life, “I wanted to feel worthy of my seat.”