Ricardo Palma. Cartas inéditas

With the issuance of this book, Father Vargas has apparently completed the pleasant task of editing those personal letters of Ricardo Palma which he has found among the papers of Nicolás de Piérola. “Pleasant task” because Palma is at his conversational, if not his highly polished literary, best in a number of these warmly personal letters. This is most strikingly the case in the letters Palma wrote to Piérola in 1881, sending them as secret reports from an enemy-occupied Lima to the leader he then considered Peru’s only hope in its military struggles with Chile.

The sixty letters and crónicas included in this book cover the years between 1880 and 1913, with the most significant and interesting one for the years 1881-1882. Twenty of the sixty have already appeared, published in periodical form in 1957 and 1960, with brief editorial comments by Father Vargas.¹ In the first instance, the twelve letters published were written by Palma to Piérola between October, 1895, and July, 1899, and were largely concerned with the affairs of the National Library; were, in fact, somewhat informal reports from the Library Director (Palma) to the nation’s President (Piérola). In the second instance, the eight letters were written between August 4th and November 3rd, 1881, from Chilean-held Lima. In neither instance, however, was the series complete as originally published. For example, the addition, in the present work, of a formal memorandum upon the state of the library (dated October 10, 1895,) makes the entire series much more significant historically. Of even greater significance, however, are the letters herein added to the Palma correspondence of the War of the Pacific period. There are now twenty-three letters, plus three crónicas, in this series, with the time span stretching from September 25, 1880, to July 5, 1882. All except three of these were directed to Piérola; the three remaining, all written in 1882 after Piérola had left Peru for Europe, were addressed to Federico Larrañaga, who was working valiantly in Panama to speak to the rest of the world for a still-resisting Peru by publishing a Peruvian newspaper in the Isthmus and, at the same time, was attempting to organize a service of supply for the Peruvian forces fighting in the sierra.

As already noted, many of these letters give documentary proof of the personal charm, wry wit, and easy, almost conversational, flow of words which must have been characteristic of this urban limeño. They also give evidence, particularly those written during Peru’s years of defeat and humiliation, of Palma’s hot political partisanship, his passionate devotion to Peru, and his bitterness toward all persons, whether Peruvians or others, who seemed to be against Peru. While much of his fire was directed against the Chileans because of their actions against his country and his city, he did not spare other foreigners, singling out, among others, the two U. S. ministers during the war years (Christiancy and Hurlbutt). The first he considered ineffectual, the second malignant. The greatest amount of space, however, was devoted to giving a detailed account of the day-to-day activities of the Peruvian group led by Francisco García Calderón that was attempting to create a new Peruvian government in the Lima suburb of La Magdalena. These men, traitors in Palma’s eyes, were also his and Piérola’s old political enemies, the civilistas, and were alternately dismissed as corrupt fumblers, gulled by the evil Chileans, or railed against as conscious advocates of treason. In either case, these members of the argolla, as he called them, were his favorite villains in the melodramatic circumstances of occupied Lima, and upon them he heaps most of the blame for the Peruvian debacle. However, he does not entirely spare his friends and associates since he pulls few punches in detailing, to Piérola and others, their shortcomings and failures.

The saltiness of phrase, the sting of wit directed against those who are either consciously or unconsciously helping to destroy his beloved Peru, to shackle his darling Lima, have also helped Father Vargas to identify some of these letters as genuine Palma. The great majority of them were signed by Palma, though this was not always so in the case of the secret war-time reports. In some instances, Palma’s distinctive handwriting made the task of identification an easy one, even if the report was signed with such a pseudonym as Hiram, or Gambetta, or Sirius. But at other times, the identification must have largely depended upon the writing style, since Piérola had a host of such correspondents (among them Modesto Basadre, Carlos de Piérola, Miguel Grace, Julio Ternaud, Frederick Ford, the Canon Dr. Manuel Santiago Medina), using, somewhat indiscriminately, such highly improbable names as the three given above, plus others such as Keplero, Pío, Vergniaud, and “el caballo de otro color.” Furthermore, they all seemed to have had access to Piérola’s private code book and to have been infected with his near-mania for secrecy. Thus, identification has been a real problem for Father Vargas, but one which he has appeared to solve, although one may possibly quibble in one or another case. Much more important is the fact that he has brought into view, for the use of historians and others, a collection of warmly human and intimately personal reports of the events within occupied Lima, as they were witnessed by this great Peruvian essayist and genre writer.