How would the reading public react if a beloved, widely read American author—a poetic commentator on art, love, and history, with a world reputation and a Nobel Prize—were to publish a long apologetical essay ascribing virtually all of his creative inspiration to the successful struggle of the free world against Communism?
It is hard to imagine so versatile a writer in America today. But even if our culture boasted such a figure, it is even more difficult to conceive of such an essay being greeted with anything but howls of outrage. That is if it were even to see print. After all, some politically incorrect writings of Saul Bellow, a Nobel laureate, resulted in nothing less than an op-ed by a New York Times reporter expressing something close to criminal intentions about Bellow’s person. (The reporter in question, of course, suffered no sanction from his employer for putting his aggressive fantasies in print.)
Yet just such a work was published, five years before his death, by the Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1914–1998), Nobel laureate in 1990 and an authentic poetry superstar. Itinerary is now available in English. To begin with the most stunning point: according to Paz, his entire creative career as a Latin literary giant grew out of the influences he underwent while living, at two different periods, in the United States. Far from viewing the U.S.as an imperialist monster crushing his spirit—as such lesser lights as Gabriel García Márquez, for example, have portrayed it—Paz
