ISSUE: Winter 1978
IN March of 1921, at age 16, Pablo Neruda left the wilderness town of Temuco in the south of Chile to enter the Teachers Institute in Santiago and study for a career in French. Dressed in the “requisite black suit of the poet,” he moved in the circle of other political and literary militants, arguing in the coffee-houses, working on the student review, exploring the city, reading indiscriminately, hunting for poetic ideas, and sitting in his boarding house room composing verse. There was never any doubt he was a poet; his mind would keep drifting back to the forest and its soft carpet of dead leaves, to the land of red and white copihues and giant rauli trees: “I have come out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world.”
By age 22, he had published six books of verse. He was given a post in the consular service and went successively to Burma, Ceylon, the Dutch West Indies, India, and Argentina. He continued writing and experimenting, his poems shifting moods, trying surrealism, feasting on the exotic images of new lands, and withdrawing deeper into an interior world of doubts and negations. In Ceylon there was a kind of bleak suspension: “Caught between the Englishmen dressed every evening in dinner jackets and the Hindus I couldn’t hope to reach in their fabulous immensity, I had only solitude open to me, and so that time was the loneliest in my life. Yet I also recall it as the most luminous, as if a lightning flash of extraordinary brightness had stopped at my window to throw light on my destiny inside and out.”
In 1934 he was posted to Spain, and his destiny grew clearer. He lectured and gave poetry readings, broadened his circle of friends, and worked with the remarkable Federico Garcia Lorca: “What a poet! I have never seen grace and genius, winged heart and crystalline waterfall, come together in anyone else as they did in him.” Then the Spanish Civil War exploded, and Lorca was assassinated. Neruda found his world, inside and out, greatly changed. “I made up my mind,” he recalls, “to throw myself into my writing with more devotion and energy. My visit to Spain had given me added strength and maturity. The bitterness in my poetry had to end. The brooding subjectivity of my Viente poemas de amor, the painful moodiness of my Residencia en la tierra, were coming to a close. In them, I now believed, I had struck a vein, not in rocks underground, but in the pages of books. Can poetry serve our fellow men? Can it find a place in man’s struggles? I had already done enough tramping over the irrational and the negative. I had to pause and find the road to humanism. . . .”
The road to humanism eventually took him back to Chile and into politics. He was elected to the senate from a district of copper and nitrate workers and joined the Communist Party. His reputation soared on the brilliant song cycles of Canto general, and by now he was a celebrated member of the international brotherhood of artists and intellectuals. Driven from his senate seat in 1948 and threatened with arrest, he was smuggled across the Andes and went into exile in Paris. From there he traveled widely in eastern Europe, China and the Soviet Union. The vagaries of Chilean politics being what they are, he was welcomed home in a few years and continued working there.
I have sketched nearly half the book, and up to this point it is a dazzling and charming quilt of anecdotes and verse interludes. He talks about Chile, of heroes and fallen poets, of a persistent wish to turn his fertile gifts outward to the service of other men.
But then he opens a cleft, a chasm. In the second half, we find Neruda steeped in glory and casting a long shadow across continents. Now it is time to sermonize on politics, canonize his opinions, lionize his friends, scorn his enemies, pardon his own prejudices, and generally behave (in tone and temper) like a pandering egotist. The poet begins sounding like a revisionist, a climber, a bourgeois nag.
He rhapsodizes about the Soviet Union: “In Moscow writers live in constant ferment, a continual exchange of ideas. There, long before the scandalmongering West discovered it, I learned that Pasternak and Mayakovsky were the best Soviet poets.” And: “The existence of a Soviet dogmatism in the arts for long periods of time cannot be denied, but it should also be mentioned that this dogmatism was always considered a defect and combated openly.” Also: “This has been my stand: above the darkness, unknown to me, of the Stalin era, Stalin rose before my eyes, a good-natured man of principles, as sober as a hermit, a titanic defender of the Russian revolution. . . .” Neruda tosses off clichés like “the revolution is life” and “precepts prepare their own grave” while ignoring the truth: that a fellow poet like Osip Mandelstam could be hounded mercilessly for writing anything subversive and could be arrested and murdered. But then Neruda was one of the “approved” poets, even served a number of years on the jury of the “Stalin Prize for Peace and Friendship among Peoples.”
Poetry is an occupation, he says. In recounting some of his great triumphs (a public reading before 130,000 in So Paulo), his awards (including the Nobel Prize in 1971), and his foreign travels, Neruda talks of his poetry as having an almost physical power, like a cattle prod that can stir and electrify. He mentions the U-2 incident and how the two men who shot down Francis Gary Powers had been interviewed and said their favorite poets were Pushkin and Neruda. “I felt infinitely happy when I heard this. The missile, which had gone up so high and forced pride so low, had somehow carried an atom of my impassioned poetry,” he says. He conjures up tales of villains and disbelievers magically “defeated” by his poems, as though he were Zeus casting down lightning bolts at those who’ve angered him. And when he says, “We poets have the right to be happy as long as we are close to the people of our country and in the thick of the fight for their happiness,” I wonder where to fit in Auden, Eliot, or James Merrill.
He spends a long passage scolding reviewers. Under a heading “The Critics Must Suffer,” he writes: “I have had more than forty years of work and several literary prizes to my credit, and my books have been published in the most surprising languages, yet not a single day goes by that I do not receive a jab or a pommeling from the envious elements around me.” He names those who have either offended or misunderstood him, and tells us that critics should be grateful books of poetry are published so that poets can fulfill their mission of giving the critics something to think about.
He defines poetic originality as “just one more fetish made up in our time,” and explains why he detests realism. Then we hear: “I have never been interested in definitions or labels. Discussions of aesthetics bore me to death.”
We hear about his wealth, about the possessions he most covets: his automobile, his house on Isla Negra, his collection of figureheads, his books, his seashells. Then he again is complaining: “But there are people who can’t bear the thought that a poet has achieved as the fruit of widely published work the material comfort all writers, musicians and painters deserve. Reactionary hacks, who are behind the times and are constantly demanding honors for Goethe, deny today’s poets the right to live.”
Well, this gets a bit wearing: the name dropping, the sloganeering (“Beware! We have to demand of the poet that he take his place in the street and in the fight. . . .”), and the incessant self-eulogizing. It has been said that Neruda is torrentially affirmative, that he rises above the excesses of his own histrionics and conceited narratives. This may be true of his poems; it is not true of his memoirs. The traces of humility we see in the beginning seem to freeze hard under numbing recitations, cold judgments, apologias, self-admiration. “I had to suffer and struggle, to live and sing. I drew my worldly share of triumphs and defeats, I tasted blood and bread. What more can a poet want? . . . And if I have received many awards, awards fleeting as butterflies, fragile as pollen. . . .” His grace seems to have vanished somewhere. Was it no more palpable than the wind?
The last chapter closes on a note of deep sorrow and bitterness. Salvatore Allende, whom Neruda admired and supported as President of Chile, had just been overthrown and murdered. “They couldn’t pass up such a beautiful occasion,” the poet writes. “He had to be machine-gunned because he would never have resigned from office. That body was buried secretly, in an inconspicuous spot. That corpse, followed to its grave only by a woman who carried with her the grief of the world, that glorious dead figure, was riddled and ripped to pieces by the machine guns of Chile’s soldiers, who had betrayed Chile once more.”
Eleven days later, Neruda died.
He promised, in his preface, to show us a “gallery full of ghosts shaken by the fire and darkness of the time.” He was true to his word on that.
