Queer Places:
Villa Ocampo, Elortondo 1837, B1643 Béccar, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Cementerio de la Recoleta
Buenos Aires, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Capital Federal, Argentina
Victoria
Ocampo
CBE (7 April 1890 – 27 January 1979) was an
Argentine writer and intellectual, described by
Jorge Luis Borges as La mujer más argentina ("The
quintessential Argentine woman"). Best known as an advocate for others and
as publisher of the literary magazine
Sur, she was also a writer and critic in her own right and one of
the most prominent South American women of her time. The Second Republic
would usher in a period where women had more rights under the law, and
where women were politically empowered for the first time. Homosexuality
was also stripped from the penal code, though there were still ways for
which lesbians could be charged, for example by being deemed dangerous to
the state, or simply being detained by the state even if their behavior
was not criminal. Prominent lesbians of this period included
Lucía Sánchez
Saornil, América Barroso,
Margarita Xirgu,
Irene Polo,
Carmen de Burgos,
María de Maeztu,
Victoria Kent and
Victoria Ocampo.
Born Ramona Victoria Epifanía Rufina Ocampo in
Buenos Aires into a high society family, she was educated at home by a
French governess. She would later write, "the alphabet-book in which I
learned to read was French, as was the hand that taught me to draw those
first letters."[1][2]
Her sister,
Silvina Ocampo, also a writer, was married to
Adolfo Bioy Casares.
She is sometimes said to have attended the
Sorbonne: on page 39 of her biography of Ocampo, Doris Meyer states
that, during the family's 1906–1907 trip to Paris, the same during which
she was etched by
Paul César Helleu, the Ocampos allowed 17-year-old Victoria,
"well-chaperoned", to audit some lectures at the Sorbonne and at the
Collège de France. She remembered particularly enjoying
Henri Bergson's lectures at the latter. She never matriculated at
either. Her old traditional wealthy family frowned on formal education for
women, so Victoria had little. In 1912, Ocampo married Bernando de Estrada
(aka Monaco Estrada). The marriage was not happy, and in 1920, the couple
separated, and Ocampo began a long–lasting affair with her husband's
cousin Julián Martínez, a diplomat.[3][2]
Victoria Ocampo, 1939, by Gisèle Freund
In Buenos Aires, she was a lynchpin of the intellectual scene of the
1920s and 1930s. Her first book, written in French, was De Francesca à
Beatrice (1923?), a commentary on
Dante's
Divine Comedy. Other works include Domingos en Hyde Park; El
Hamlet
de
Laurence Olivier;
Emily Brontë (Terra incógnita); a series called Testimonios
(ten volumes);
Virginia Woolf, Orlando y Cía;
San Isidro; 338171 T.E. (Lawrence of Arabia) (a biography
of
T. E. Lawrence) and a posthumously published autobiography. There is
also an edited book of dialogues between Ocampo and Borges.[2]
Ocampo corresponded with
Virginia Woolf in the later 1930s; the two writers met in London in
June 1939 but the meeting was not a success.
[4]
Perhaps of greater significance than her own writing, she was founder
(1931) and publisher of the magazine Sur, the most important
literary magazine of its time in
Latin America. Among the writers published in Sur were
Jorge Luis Borges,
Ernesto Sabato,
Adolfo Bioy Casares,
Julio Cortázar,
José Ortega y Gasset,
Manuel Peyrou,
Albert Camus,
Enrique Anderson Imbert,
José Bianco,
Ezequiel Martínez Estrada,
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle,
Waldo Frank,
Gabriela Mistral,
Eduardo Mallea and
Silvina Ocampo (her younger sister).[5]
In 1935, Ocampo expressed some approval for
Benito Mussolini with whom she was granted an interview in March of
that year in Rome, hailing him then as "genius" and Caesar reborn.[6]
"I have seen Italy in blossom turn its face towards him."[7]
However, she was never a convinced fascist sympathizer, and expressed
disapproval of Mussolini's conservative views on gender roles and the
regime's growing militarism.[8]
By the time her interview with Mussolini was published in August 1936,
Italy had invaded Abyssinia and Ocampo appended a note to it declaring
that any hope that the fascist regime might improve was lost and
criticized those in Argentina who supported Italy's belligerence.[9]
In 1937 Ocampo and the editors of Sur came out openly against
fascism and definitively linked the journal with
liberalism.[10]
During the
Spanish Civil War, the magazine sided with the
Republicans.[11]
She supported and edited from Argentina in collaboration with her friend
and translator,
Pelegrina Pastorino, the anti-Nazi magazine Lettres Francaises,
directed by
Roger Caillois and in 1946 she was the only Argentinean who attended
the
Nuremberg Trials. A few months before
World War II, in 1939, Ocampo is appointed to the
International committee on intellectual cooperation (League
of Nations, Geneva) but does not participate in its works.[12]
In 1953, Ocampo was briefly imprisoned for her open opposition to the
government of
Juan Domingo Perón.[13]
She was made a member of the Argentine Academy of Letters in 1976 (the
first woman ever admitted to the Academy; she formally took her seat on 23
June 1977). The "cultural dialog", initiated in 1977 by the de facto
government but organized by
UNESCO,
was held in her home,
Villa Ocampo, in
San Isidro,
Buenos Aires Province; she eventually donated the house to
UNESCO
in 1943.[14]
At "Villa Ocampo"
Igor Stravinsky,
André Malraux and
Rabindranath Tagore had been her guests, also
Indira Gandhi,
José Ortega y Gasset,
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Ernest Ansermet,
Rafael Alberti, etc.
Graham Greene dedicated his 1973 novel
The Honorary Consul to her, "with love, and in memory of the many
happy weeks I have passed at San Isidro and
Mar del Plata".
Victoria Ocampo died in Buenos Aires in 1979, and is buried in
La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.[15]
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