The rich literary history of Lake Chapala over the past 130 years is exemplified by the extraordinary diversity of short stories that have used the lake as their setting or backdrop. This post considers some of the noteworthy twentieth century examples.
This map in Terry’s Mexico handbook for Travellers (1909) helped persuade D. H. Lawrence to visit Chapala.
The earliest short story (English or Spanish) set, or partially set, at Lake Chapala I currently know of is “The Sorceress: How an American Engineer was Sacrificed to the Aztec Gods,” written by U.S.-born civil engineer Edwin Hall Warner (1858-1927) and published in The Argonaut in 1894. The story is set in La Barca, which was on the eastern shore of the lake prior to the massive land reclamation scheme of the early twentieth century which cost Lake Chapala roughly one-third of its historic surface area.
In 1900, The Argonaut also published “The White Rebozo. A Vision of the Night on the Mystic Waters of Lake Chapala,” by Gwendolyn Overton (1874-1978). Something of a literary prodigy, Overton had previously written several other short stories set in Mexico, and wrote several well-received novels.
Author, poet and diplomat José de Olivares wrote “Mexico’s Beautiful Inland Sea,” an apparently fictionalized account of a perilous boat trip on Lake Chapala, published in 1901. The article’s illustrations include an early photograph of the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala.
The talented writer Charles Fleming Embree (1874-1905), author of A Dream of a Throne, the earliest English-language novel set at Lake Chapala (and written while on his honeymoon), was well known in U.S. literary circles for his short stories. Embree’s “The Guiltless Thieves,” published in 1902, includes mentions of Chapala and neighboring locations.
José Rafael Rubio wrote a prize-winning short story set at Lake Chapala in Spanish in 1907 titled “El hombre doble.” An English version of the story was published a few years later in San Francisco-based Town Talk, as “Not Guilty.” It is the well-crafted story of a man accused of murder who claims to his lawyer that he was merely a witness to the crime.
The earliest short story related to Lake Chapala with an ecological dimension is “José la garza morena” (“José the Great Blue Heron”), written by José López Portillo y Rojas (1850-1923), and published in Cosmos (a monthly Mexico City magazine) in 1912. It is a tale about someone finding a heron that has been shot and wounded, and their efforts to save it.
Nature and travel writer Emma-Lindsay Squier (1892-1941) visited Lake Chapala in the 1920s, while spending several months in Guadalajara. She later wrote “The Little Lost Stars of Chapala,” a short story based on a local legend, which was published in Good Housekeeping.
Guadalajara poet Idella Purnell‘s “The Idols Of San Juan Cosala,” a charming story written for a juvenile audience, was first published in 1936 in American Junior Red Cross News. The story was reprinted in El Ojo del Lago in December 2001.
American journalist, poet and author Clifford Gessler (1893-1979) included a chapter about Chapala in Pattern of Mexico, published in 1941. This chapter was repackaged as a short story titled “The Haunted Lake,” in Mexican Life the following year.
Harvard-educated William Standish Stone (1905-1970) wrote many short stories and several books. The protagonist in “La Soñadora” (The Dreamer), his 1947 short story about the impacts of an epidemic in Ajijic, is inexorably drawn deep into the villagers’ world of intrigue, sorcery, and witchcraft.
In the early 1950s, established novelist Glendon Swarthout (1918-1992) spent six months in Ajijic with his wife, Kathryn, and their 5-year-old son, Miles. Swarthout. A few years later, Swarthout published “Ixion,” a short story set at Lake Chapala. Miles Swarthout became a successful screenwriter and turned “Ixion” into an unpublished screenplay titled Convictions of the Heart.
Novelist Elaine Gottlieb (1916-2004) lived for several months in Ajijic in the second half of 1946, soon after her first novel, Darkling, was accepted for publication. Based on her time in Ajijic, Gottlieb wrote a short story titled “Passage Through Stars,” published in 1959.
Writer, poet and movie producer Hans Oppenheimer was living in Ajijic in 1964 when he his short story, “The Value of the Ear,” was published by the prestigious Southwest Review. While the storyline is unrelated to the lake, several other Lake Chapala-based authors had work published in Southwest Review over the years, including Paul Alexander Bartlett, Willard “Butch” Marsh, and Witter Bynner, whose poem “Beach at Chapala” was published by the magazine in 1947.
Artist and writer Allyn Hunt (1931-2002), who had taken a creative writing class at the University of Southern California given by Willard Marsh, settled in the Lake Chapala area in the 1960s. Hunt and his wife later bought the Guadalajara Reporter, which Hunt edited and published for more than 20 years. Several of his tightly written short stories were published in the Transatlantic Review, including “A Mole’s Coat,” about doing acid ‘jaunts’ at Lake Chapala.
If you know of, or come across, other early short stories about the lake, please get in touch!
Note: Lovers of short prose might also enjoy the short novel set at Lake Chapala written by Frank Herbert (1920-1986), author of Dune, who had accompanied his friend Jack Vance to Chapala in 1953. Herbert’s 18,000-word novella, exploring interactions between Mexicans and Americans, was unpublished during his lifetime, but was released by his estate as an ebook titled A Thorn in the Bush in 2014.
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Sources
- Charles Embree. 1902. “The Guiltless Thieves.” National Advocate, 12 July 1902.
- Clifford F. Gesler. 1942. “The Haunted Lake.” Mexican Life, June 1932, 13-1.
- Elaine Gottlieb. 1959. “Passage Through Stars.” Noonday #2, 80-93.
- Allyn Hunt. 1969. “A Mole’s Coat.” The Transatlantic Review, Summer 1969.
- José López Portillo y Rojas. 1912. “José la garza morena.” Cosmos (Mexico City), June 1912.
- José de Olivares. 1901. “Mexico’s Beautiful Inland Sea.” The Sunday Oregonian (Portland), 2 June 1901, 32.
- Hans Oppenheimer. 1964. “The Value of the Ear,” Southwest Review, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Spring 1964), 174-178.
- Gwendolen Overton. 1900. “The White Rebozo.” The Argonaut (San Francisco), 23 July 1900, 4.
- Idella Purnell. 1936. “The Idols Of San Juan Cosala.” American Junior Red Cross News, December 1936.
- José Rafael Rubio. 1911. “Not guilty.” Town Talk (the Pacific Weekly), 16 December 1911.
- Emma-Lindsay Squier. 1928. “The Little Lost Stars of Chapala.” Good Housekeeping, Vol 87 #2 (August 1928), 98-101, 206, 209-212.
- William S. Stone. “La Soñadora,” Mexican Life, March 1947, 13-14, 74-84.
- Glendon Swarthout. 1958. “Ixion.” New World Writing #13. Mentor.
- Edwin Hall Warner. 1894. “The Sorceress : How an American Engineer was Sacrificed to the Aztec Gods.” The Argonaut (San Francisco), Vol. XXXV. No. 2 (July, 1894), 4.
Comments, corrections and additional material welcome, whether via comments feature or email.
Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).