Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 19, 1995 TAG: 9511170100
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NIKE PRICE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
But the distinguished scholar, former ambassador to France and professor at Harvard and Columbia universities grimaces when asked about a flurry of news articles in which colleagues accuse him of plagiarizing much of his work.
Fuentes, 66, previously had refused to address the charges, and in his first public comments on the controversy he tried to place himself above them.
``I steer clear of the cat fights and gossip that drain writers' energy,'' he said, speaking impeccable English. ``You have to steer clear of them because it's a loss of time.''
But he acknowledged that the charges were making him uncomfortable, and he attacked the people who were making them.
``This is something that happens sooner or later to every writer,'' he said. ``You have mediocre, unknown people who latch onto your name and accuse you of things. These accusations are born from bad faith and outright enmity.''
The controversy started when Victor Manuel Celorio Garrido, a less-than-successful writer who runs a graphic arts shop in Mexico City, filed a lawsuit accusing Fuentes of borrowing from one of his works to write ``Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone,'' recently released in English.
When the lawsuit became public, several prominent writers emerged to accuse Fuentes of plagiarizing in earlier works.
Fuentes denied having read Celorio's 1985 book, ``The Blue Unicorn,'' and dismissed Celorio as an unfortunate publicity seeker.
Celorio, in a telephone interview from his Mexico City home, said he had never intended to make the lawsuit public because of his respect for Fuentes. That changed, he said, when Fuentes' lawyers tried to intimidate him.
``His lawyers basically said, `You're crazy, and if you try to mess with Carlos Fuentes you're going to regret it,''' he said.
Fuentes called that ridiculous, but the uproar drew the interest of other prominent Latin American writers.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a Cuban-born writer who lives in London, told reporters that Fuentes' novel, ``Birthdays,'' is based on one of his screenplays.
Elena Garro, a Mexican writer and ex-wife of poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, told El Universal newspaper that ``Carlitos has always liked to steal other people's things,'' although in an interview with The Associated Press she said she wasn't sure he was a plagiarist because ``writers take a lot from each other.''
Fuentes said his book is taken mostly from his own life. ``Diana'' is a highly personal account of a two-month affair between Fuentes and actress Jean Seberg.
The narrator, named Carlos, meets ``Diana'' at a Mexico City party in 1969 and promptly leaves his wife to run off to a small Mexican town called Santiago, where Diana is filming a Western.
The affair begins passionately but rapidly falls into routine. When Diana grows tired of the erudite writer, she rejects him in favor of other lovers, including a Black Panther who curses her for being white and a foul-smelling student activist from Santiago.
``I need a man I don't like, a man who'll bring me back to the gutter, the sewer, who'll make me feel I'm nobody, who'll make me fight again, work my way up ... who'll make my adrenaline flow,'' she says.
The writer is heartbroken and consumed with jealousy - ``jealousy kills love, but it leaves desire intact,'' Fuentes said - but makes no apology for his scholarly apathy in tumultuous times. The story is set shortly after the government massacred hundreds of rebellious students.
``Creation is an action, the only action,'' the narrator says. ``You don't have to die in order to imagine death. ... And if you get shot or murdered, you're useless. You don't write any more books.''
Or, as Fuentes explained: ``Here is a character who is spurned not for his vices but for his virtues. I'm delighted to be what I am.''
Diana seeks out vices, and finds them. Years later, the narrator learns, she commits suicide in Paris, wasted by alcohol and drugs and by an FBI smear campaign against her.
``Diana'' was a best seller in Mexico, but has received poor reviews in the United States.
Celorio's book, which was never published except for a 200-copy run the author bankrolled for family and friends, recounts an affair between a Mexican writer and an American woman.
Celorio calls it an autobiographical account of his romance with his wife of 17 years, and his book, unlike Fuentes', ends with love redeeming the relationship. The rest, he says, is nearly identical.
``When I read it, my reaction was: ``Hey, wait a second. I've seen this movie before,''' Celorio said. ``There is an enormous amount of similarity in every aspect.''
A study, he pointed out several times, revealed 130 similarities. In an interview, he cited three- or four-word phrases that occurred in both books, and of overarching themes he said they shared.
Celorio triumphantly noted that in both books, the narrator is working on an ambitious work dealing with the affair between conquistador Hernando Cortes and La Malinche, the Indian woman who gives birth to the first mixed-race child - and symbolically, to all Mexicans.
Fuentes retorted that not only had he been working on such a project during his affair with Seberg, he completed it 15 years before Celorio wrote ``The Blue Unicorn.'' Fuentes' 1970 play is titled ``All Cats Are Gray.''
``I have been very fortunate in my friends,'' Fuentes said, ``but very unfortunate in my enemies.''
by CNB