Neruda, p.13
Neruda, page 13
In the next lines, he penetrates her body, her world, connecting with her profoundly:
My savage peasant body plows through you
and makes the son surge from the depths of the earth.
His anguish relied on the hope of carnal relief:
I went alone as a tunnel. Birds fled from me,
I was invaded by the power of the night.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling.
He shoots his phallic arrow, in retaliation for his injured heart:
But the hour of vengeance strikes, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of ardent, constant milk.
The drama echoes his letters to Albertina: vengeance, followed by declarations of love. Here as well, Neruda portrays Albertina as absent as he engages the “chalices” of her breasts. He attempts to fill that absence and she moans:
Ah the chalices of the breasts! Ah the eyes of absence!
Ah the roses of the pubis! Ah your voice slow and sad!
But his orgasm does not satisfy:
Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my infinite anguish, my indecisive path!
Dark riverbeds where eternal thirst follows,
and fatigue follows, and infinite sorrow.
Despite an audience to share in his yearnings, and despite the popular acclaim for Twenty Love Poems, fatigue and sorrow continued to follow Neruda. As he turned twenty and embraced a life of literary success, there was another challenge that started to make itself starker, dogging him and his hopes for the future: the need to make a living.
Chapter Seven
Dead Gallop
Every day I have to find money to eat. I have suffered a bit, my girl, and I have wanted to kill myself, out of boredom and desperation.
—Letter to Albertina Azócar, August 26, 1925
When Albertina’s brother, Rubén, returned to Chile from a trip to Mexico in May 1925, he found his friend Neruda in sad shape. Despite the success of Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song, “Pablo’s state of mind was anxious, disconcerted,” Rubén wrote.
The frequent letters Neruda sent Albertina during this period demonstrated his disquietude. One missive is especially revealing of his mental state. It was written during a difficult visit to his parents’ in Temuco, on September 24, 1924, “at night, beside the fire.”
These days have been bitter, my little Albertina. Nervous breakdown or accumulation of crap. I can’t bear it alone. At night: insomnia, painful, long. I become desperate, feverish. Last night I read two long novels. I already woke up and I still toss and turn in bed like an invalid . . . Why did my mother give birth to me among these stones? And as exhausted as I am I haven’t the strength to take the train [back to Santiago] . . .
Rubén had noted that Neruda was suffering through a trio of problems: “money, love, and poetry.”
With regard to love, Neruda was still furious at and obsessed with Albertina, who was studying in Concepción. In Temuco on summer vacation in March 1925, Neruda had written her another letter from his boyhood desk. The words he chose for the salutation were “Ugly brat.” He told her that he didn’t know what people were telling her about him, but that it was all meaningless, because he loved her.
Perhaps she’d heard about him sleeping with the young Laura Arrué or other girls: “You know that I like to have fun . . . [but my] heart belongs to you, my little cockroach, thread by thread, all the way down to the roots. Everything else, can it matter to you?”
He asked her what plans she had to return to Santiago. “I believe you need to do this: take advantage of the faith your father has in you, speak to him seriously, and tell him that you inevitably have to study [in Santiago], win it, conquest it.” He urged her to respond, ending the letter, “Think of how I need to hear from you every day, darling bitch.”
No words from Neruda could enable Albertina to challenge her father. Neruda, meanwhile, never seems to have thought to move to Concepción, even though it was home to one of the best universities outside of Santiago.
Albertina still found Neruda intriguing and compelling. While he constantly insulted her in his letters, he would wrap tender expressions of affection around his insults. He had proven his devotion by coming to her bedside every day after her surgery. He had written remarkable poems to her. He had a distinguished mind, a handsome appearance, and, of course, a prominent reputation now as a young, startling poet.
While one part of Neruda’s mind was fixed on the unattainable Albertina, he was still smitten with Laura Arrué in Santiago. After she graduated from high school, they began to see each other frequently. She had a “celestial” beauty and charming disposition, according to his friends; she was bright and embarking on a successful teaching career. Their relationship seems to have been sexual from the start. In 1924, he gave her a copy of Twenty Love Poems. “Hide them under your mattress,” he told her. “They’d better not find them because they’ll tear it up.”
Yet while he and Laura were engaged in their love affair, he was writing frequent letters to Albertina in Concepción. A year after the publication of Twenty Love Poems, his words to her continued to match its verses. “Ah,” he wrote Albertina that April, “if you only knew, my dear little woman, the crazy desire to have you next to me . . . to eat you up with kisses that are greater than this absence.”
Neruda faithfully accompanied Laura to the Ministry of Education as she inquired about her forthcoming teaching appointment, helping her secure the position she deserved. The job was at a little school in Peñaflor, a small town twenty miles southwest of Santiago. Despite the relatively short distance, the logistics of transportation made it difficult for Neruda to visit her. He had to take a train at eight A.M., get off in Malloco, and then take a coach pulled by four Percherons. But it was well worth it for him to surprise Laura. The flor in Peñaflor means “flower”; the area was famous for its abundant greenery and streams, large parks among century-old haciendas bursting with flowers. Neruda would return to Santiago before dusk, bunches of lilacs and honeysuckles in his hands, flushed and smiling.
As their romance became more intense, so did the obstacles between them. Just like with Amelia and Teresa, Laura’s parents took actions to prevent their eighteen-year-old daughter from sleeping with a famed bohemian “Don Juan” poet. They called on the family in whose residence Laura stayed to watch her every move and to try to prevent contact between the lovers.
Enraged and indignant, Neruda conspired to kidnap Laura, with her consent. His partner in the operation was Eduardo Barrios, the same writer who had helped convince Carlos Nascimento to publish Twenty Love Poems. He owned a car—the key to the operation. The two waited until midnight, flashing the car’s headlights to send off the agreed-upon signals. But Laura had lost her courage to attempt such a brazen act. While the idea had seemed thrilling and romantic at first, its potential repercussions were too severe. The writers waited and waited, but Laura never came out. Neruda returned to Santiago, sullen with disappointment.
Neruda’s financial situation was as desperate as his love life. Despite Twenty Love Poems’ popularity, the number of copies actually sold was slim, the royalties a pittance. José del Carmen, having realized that his son had suspended his studies, completely cut off the allowance he had been providing.
Upon Neruda’s solicitation, Nascimento hired Neruda to assemble an anthology of selected works by the Socialist French Nobel laureate Anatole France. But that money did not sustain him for long. Writing for Claridad couldn’t keep him afloat, nor could the pieces he placed here and there in mainstream newspapers. Since he would not be graduating from the Pedagogy Institute, he could not teach in a formal setting for lack of formal credentials. He didn’t teach informally either. He did receive some compensation for recitals and talks, but he was not actively marketing himself as a speaker for hire.
Though his sister, Laura, served as intermediary, delivering secret small gifts of cash from his stepmother, Neruda depended as much on his renown in the bohemian world to pay for meals and drinks as he did on his uncertain cash flow. When he returned to Santiago from Temuco at the end of March 1925, he didn’t even have a room in a pension to call his own. He considered leaving Chile but didn’t have the resources to do so.
Nascimento, meanwhile, was eager for more work from his star poet and gave him a tiny advance for a new book. Though it was just a minor financial contribution, it may have served as valuable encouragement during Neruda’s travails to tackle new creative terrain.
Rubén had mentioned that when he returned from Mexico, Neruda was in such a state that it seemed “his soul was spinning around itself, seeking its own center . . . he wanted to renew himself in some way, to examine himself from a different dimension.” The desire for self-exploration, the craving for new perspectives through which he might ground himself, was leading Neruda to experiment once again with his style—he’d revive himself through the creative process.
Facing another aesthetic crossroads, Neruda recommitted to uncharted literary adventure and experimentation. Despite the love poems’ unique potency, he was restless and determined to break with their lyrical realism and with poetry’s traditional forms in general. He was done with realism. He now intended to “strip poetry of all its objectiveness and to say what I have to say in the most serious form possible.”
This resulted in his discovery of a unique avant-garde form. It was void of rhyme and meter, and used no punctuation or capitalization in an attempt to better replicate the raw articulation of the subconscious. He strove to bring his poetry even closer to “irreducible purity, the closest approximation to naked thought, to the intimate labor of the soul.” Neruda didn’t even use capital letters in the title of the book that this experiment produced: tentativa del hombre infinito (venture of the infinite man). Twenty-five years after its publication, reflecting on what the experience did for him as a writer, Neruda would call venture “one of the most important books of my poetry.”
With venture he was developing a unique form of automatic writing, a technique that enabled him to successfully move forward from the realism of his earlier poetry. In fact, he expounded on this new creative process in an article in Claridad the very month Twenty Love Poems was published, June 1924. It is titled, appropriately, “A Scattered Expression”:
I write and write without being enchained by my thought, without bothering to free myself from chance associations . . . I let my feelings loose in whatever I write. Disassociated, grotesque, my writing represents my diverse and discordant depth. I build in my words a construct with free matter, and while creating I eliminate what has no existence or any palpable hold.
The approach Neruda delineates in this article is in line with many of the tenets of the surrealist movement developing in Paris. Yet “A Scattered Expression” appeared four months before André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris, showing that Neruda was right there with the avant-garde, if not, in his own way, even a bit out in front of it. His writing method wasn’t an appropriation; Neruda’s method was very much his own.
Surrealism stems from the principle that true creative force comes from the unconscious and that art is the main vehicle for its release. As Breton wrote in his manifesto, it is “based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations.” The “omnipotence of dream” and the “disinterested play of thought” are key.
Yet, as René de Costa highlights, while Breton and other surrealists wanted to capture the voice of the subconscious, Neruda wanted to only emulate its style. Toward this end, he didn’t let the flow of spontaneous thought fall purely onto the final page. Instead, he filtered those “scattered expressions” with some review and revision, improving the composition’s clarity, creating some conscious constructions and recurring themes.*
These measured changes gave Neruda a kind of life preserver for the poem to stay afloat above the incomprehensibility of the deep unconscious. Thus protected, Neruda moved closer toward recapturing the subconscious through his novel technique of stripping out all punctuation and capitalization, not only as a means of bringing his poetry closer to “naked thought,” but as an artistic aid that loosened the flow of the poetic discourse, an uninhibited structure that mirrors the poem’s dreamscape setting.†
That dreamscape permeates the book, which centers on the fantastic nocturnal voyage of a melancholic young man who sets off on a quest to rediscover himself, to reach a state of pure consciousness. We accompany him as he embarks on a journey through time and space, through unity and disunity with the night, a lyrical narrative, played out over fifteen cantos, each uniquely composed but intimately linked. They are spread over forty-four pages, divided up and placed on each page in an inconsistent but not random fashion, creating blocks of white space that add to the book’s illusory feel.
The poem’s Infinite Man searches for absolute oneness, a new reality, a restored consciousness—a quest that mirrors Neruda’s own search for self-discovery and expression. In fact, the book has been described as “one part quest and one part inner map.” And interestingly, it is through a creative process originating in “scattered” thoughts and unconscious tone that the quest is composed. Neruda was twenty when he first started writing venture; at the beginning of the book we learn that the poem’s subject is “a man of twenty.” We see this young man with his “soul in despair,” the same state in which Rubén found Neruda just before he began writing venture, with his soul “spinning around itself, seeking its own center.”
In the opening canto, Neruda depicts an almost cinematic tapestry of the nocturnal void through which the man will travel. Soon, like Alice with her looking glass, he will shatter “my heart like a mirror in order to walk through myself.” He is now enabled to travel through night, attempting to conquer it so that he can achieve that absolute oneness. In a midbook climax, he achieves physical union during a sexual experience with night, personified as a woman; he becomes one with the night:
twisting to that side or beyond you continue being mine
in the solitude of dusk your smile knocks
in that instant vines climb to my window
wind from high above lashes the hunger for your presence
Following the ecstasy of this climactic encounter with night, we no longer find him melancholic. He is enlivened:
ah i surprise myself i sing delirious under the big top
like a lovestruck tightrope walker or the first fisherman
He also now has the ability to be a poet, and he begins to meditatively seek his inner self:
letting the sky in deeply watching the sky i am thinking
sitting uncertainly on that edge
oh sky woven with water and paper
i began to speak to myself in a low voice determined not to leave
This ties in to Rubén’s description of Neruda’s determination to conduct his own introspective search. This desire for self-exploration and the craving for new perspectives through which he might ground himself not only led Neruda to experiment with his creative process and style, but also manifested themselves as elements of venture’s narrative: that meditative thinking generates the poetic narrative.
And while, by the final canto, it seems that he has achieved his quest (“i am standing in the light like midday on earth / i want to tell it all with tenderness”), off the written page, the completion of the book brought no immediate personal resolution to his trio of agitations, “love, money, and poetry.” His new book failed to garner the critical and popular reception he had hoped for, outside of those few on the vanguard.* Indeed, in 1950, twenty-five years after he finished writing it, Neruda noted that venture was “the least read and least studied of all my work.” The book has consistently been passed over primarily because of its heavy experimentalism, which, on the one hand, makes it so exceptional and rich, yet, on the other, has caused readers, critics, and publishers (and translators) to shy away from its unconventional form. It didn’t help that its feeble reception was quickly overshadowed by the tremendous achievements of Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth), his subsequent book of poetry (achievements, as we shall see, that were in part due to his experimentation in venture).
One of the first mainstream reviews of venture came from Raúl Silva Castro, the former student leader who was the first to publish Neruda in Claridad. Now a critic for El Mercurio, he complained: “The flesh and blood we had admired so much in the author’s other books are missing here . . . [A reader] might just as well begin to read from the back as from the front, or even the middle. One would understand the same, that is to say, very little.” Alone, who wasn’t too keen on Twenty Love Poems, was perplexed at this latest work. He referred to the book as “going the way of the absurd.”
Venture’s negative popular reception was certainly disconcerting to Neruda. But still, he had accomplished a remarkable achievement: for a poet known for his constant evolution, venture is one of the most striking examples of Neruda’s growth as a poet. He successfully broke out of the confinements of the conventions he first trained on and found a new way to express himself freely, even inventing a way to capture the style of how language sounded inside his mind. The book may prove a bit difficult to follow, but it isn’t a total spill of scattered thought. It shimmers with poetic tension and a sense of thematic purpose. Indeed, the first poems of his next book, Residence on Earth, drew on Neruda’s unique approach to surrealism, displaying a novel use of expressive symbols and images. This is the most important result of Neruda’s experimentation with venture: he had set forth to construct a new style and, in doing so, built the essential poetic infrastructure that served as the bridge between the blockbuster lyrics of Twenty Love Poems and his unprecedented, tremendously resounding, and influential Residence on Earth.
