Guillermo Cabrera Infante

According to the screenwriter of John Huston's Under The Volcano movie, Wieland Schulz-Keil, in his essay The 67th Reading contained in Paul Tiessen's Apparently Incongruous Parts, there were 67 screenplays written for the filming of Lowry's Under The Volcano. One of those screenplays was written by Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante worked with Joseph Losey on a film adaptation of Under The Volcano movie. I came across a page detailing his letters to Losey in the early 70's in Princeton University. You can read the background to the film script and Infante's intepretation of Under The Volcano in Guillermo Cabrera Infante By Raymond D. Souza.



Apparently, Infante took about 12 weeks to write the script, and near the end he began to go mad. He would, for instance, dress up in a tuxedo to go see his doctor. This sounds amusing, at least in retrospect, but the writer also became paranoid and delusional and finally lost consciousness totally. Electroconvulsant therapy was the prescribed remedy.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante (April 22, 1929 – February 21, 2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, and critic; in the 1950s he used the pseudonym G. Caín. A one-time supporter of the Castro regime, Cabrera Infante went into exile to London in 1965. He is best known for the novel Tres Tristes Tigres (literally "three sad tigers", but published in English as Three Trapped Tigers), which has been compared favorably to James Joyce's Ulysses. Read more on Wikipedia

Here is a video about Infante: