Neruda, p.16
Neruda, page 16
Although Walt Whitman’s influence on Neruda was still light, they talked about his importance to both of them. They also spoke of the Spanish language. Borges declared, tongue in cheek, that it was “a hopeless, clumsy language in which no one had achieved anything,” referring to the sound of Spanish, with its long words and, relative to English, its rigidity for writing poetry. Smiling, they decided it was too late to start writing in English all of a sudden. They would “have to make the best of our second-rate literature,” Borges said, recalling the conversation years later.
Their meeting was much more diplomatic than intimate; they would never develop a fraternal relationship. In fact, the two would become distant though relatively respectful rivals, mainly due to political differences. There was also an element of ego, as for most of the twentieth century they were considered the top two South American writers. Two years after the encounter in Buenos Aires, Neruda would write to an Argentine friend, “Borges really seems to be a ghost from an old library . . . Borges, who you’ve mentioned, seems too preoccupied with issues of culture and society, which don’t totally interest me, as they are not human issues. I prefer good wines, love, suffering, and books as consolation for the inevitable solitude . . . I even feel a certain disdain for culture as a way to interpret things . . . In my world I see fewer ideas, always more bodies, sunlight, and sweat.”
In a 1975 interview, Borges said that Neruda “wrote all those silly sentimental love poems, you know . . . When he became a Communist his poetry became very strong. I like Neruda the Communist.” He may have liked Neruda the Communist poet, but he certainly did not like Neruda the Communist idealist. One of the reasons they never met again was that Borges’s conservatism and Neruda’s communism were incompatible.
They made special efforts to avoid further encounters. On one occasion, when Borges visited Chile, Neruda chose that time to go on vacation. It seems to have occurred to both of them that, except for the Spanish language, they had very little in common as writers.
In a 1970 interview for the Paris Review, Neruda was prompted by the statement: “Some people accuse you of being antagonistic toward Jorge Luis Borges.”
“The antagonism toward Borges may exist in an intellectual or cultural form because of our different orientation,” Neruda answered. “One can fight peacefully. But I have other enemies—not writers. For me the enemy is imperialism, and my enemies are the capitalists and those who drop napalm on Vietnam. But Borges is not my enemy . . . He understands nothing of what’s going on in the contemporary world; he thinks that I understand nothing either. Therefore, we are in agreement.”
* * *
Neruda and Hinojosa boarded the Badén, the boat that would take them first to Rio de Janeiro and then on to Lisbon, Portugal. “This German ship supposedly had just one class, but this ‘one class’ must have been the fifth,” Neruda recalled. It seemed to be divided between two main groups of passengers: Portuguese and Spanish immigrants, whose meals were served together, as quickly as possible, and then a variety of others with higher social ranking, mostly Germans who were heading back from working in comfortable positions in mines and factories all over the Southern Cone.
On July 12, 1927, Neruda wrote to his sister two hours before arriving in Lisbon. It was his twenty-third birthday, though he makes no reference to it in the letter. Instead, he announces his itinerary: Portugal, Spain, and then France. While so many of his generation from around the world were in Paris long-term, he would stay for less than two weeks before heading on to Burma.
When he wrote Laura, Neruda was not thinking of the rich experiences that awaited him on the Left Bank but, rather, was focused on his anxiety:
I’m a little scared of arriving, because here on board I’ve learned that life is extremely expensive there, that the cheapest boardinghouse costs $1.600 a month, and I’m going with very little money. Even more there’s plague, tertian fever, fevers of all types. But what is there to do! We have to submit to life and struggle with it, thinking that nobody else will take care of you.
After a brief stay in Lisbon, they arrived in Madrid on July 16. Neruda would stay there for just three days. It was a chance to introduce himself as a poet in the land from which his mother tongue originated, but the experience was disturbing. Of the very few people he saw in the city, which in five years’ time would become a beloved home, one was the critic and poet Guillermo de Torre, who happened to be Borges’s brother-in-law. He had become a leading spokesperson for the Spanish avant-garde flourishing then in Europe and Latin America, especially of its experimental branch, ultraísmo.
There are two very different accounts of the visit. In 1950, Neruda claimed:
When I arrived in Spain for the first time in 1927 . . . I met Guillermo de Torre, who was the literary critic with modern tendencies, and I showed him the first originals of the first volume of Residence on Earth. He read the first poems, and when he was done he told me, with all the frankness of a friend, “I didn’t see or understand anything, and I didn’t know what you proposed with them.” I thought I would stay longer. But then, seeing the impermeability of this man, I took it as a bad symptom and I went to France . . . I had just turned twenty-three and it was natural that Spain in the last days of ultraísmo was not the place for me.
Ultraísmo favored fragmentation and surprise, a rejection of the traditional representations of reality and its “impurities,” and exalted the mechanical and the scientific, everything “modern” and innovative, over the intimate, the transcendental, and the human. It was not what Neruda was about. In fact, during his return to Spain seven years later, he would write a famous essay defending his “impure poetry.”
In a friendly and open letter to Neruda, Guillermo de Torre replied with his own version of their encounter, saying that they had talked cordially at a café until dawn. He didn’t remember reading any of the poems from Residence on Earth, but “the only thing I can be certain of is that I did not pronounce the word that you perhaps hoped to hear: genial [‘full of genius; brilliant’].”
Just two weeks after their encounter in Madrid, de Torre wrote “Panoramic Sketch of Chilean Poetry.” Published in the journal La Gaceta Literaria (which de Torre helped found), it named Neruda “the undeniable head of the lyrical advances currently occurring in Chile,” the “profound star that his young colleagues followed.” He admired Twenty Love Poems, “a point of perfection and harmony,” but imperfection and instability followed, as Neruda was “unsatisfied” with that book and “tried to outdo himself.” In Madrid he had given de Torre his most recently published books, such as venture of the infinite man. In them, de Torre wrote, Neruda leaped far forward, “banishing all coercive norms.” Yet while his ambition created “an abstract, naked lyricism,” he seemed to have tried too hard, this poetry not working nearly as well as when he was writing more in tune. Despite de Torre’s slight reservations about the later work, the article, especially given that it appeared in a prestigious European journal, was a significant acknowledgment of Neruda’s importance.
Four days after they arrived in Spain, Neruda and Hinojosa were off to Paris, the city of Neruda’s dreams. All of Paris, all of France, all of Europe, seemed contained in “two hundred meters and two street corners: Montparnasse, La Rotonde, Le Dôme, La Coupole, and three or four other cafés.” It was the zenith of the Montparnasse scene, and Neruda, dipping his toes in for the first time, was profoundly impressed. He also met one significant and talented Latin American poet present at the time in the City of Light:
During those days I met César Vallejo, the great cholo [indigenous]; poet of wrinkled poetry, difficult to the touch like a jungled skin, but it was magnificent poetry with superhuman power. Incidentally, we had a little run-in right after we met. It was in La Rotonde. We were introduced, and in his exquisite Peruvian accent, he greeted me by saying: “You are the greatest of all our poets. Only Rubén Darío can compare with you.” “Vallejo,” I said, “if you want us to be friends, don’t ever say anything like that to me again. I don’t know where we’d end up if we started treating each other like writers.”
Neruda was also able to enjoy a particular aspect of Parisian nightlife, at least for a few hours. Alfredo Cóndon, a mediocre writer and the wealthy son of Chile’s biggest shipping magnate, invited Neruda and Álvaro out for an adventurous night on the town. He was crazy but kind and well liked. He took them to a Russian nightclub whose walls were decorated with landscapes of the Caucasus. They soon found themselves surrounded by very young Russian women, or women pretending they were Russian, dressed like peasants from the mountains. They danced, as Cóndon ordered more and more champagne, until he passed out cold on the floor.
After they unloaded Cóndon at his luxurious hotel, the two Chileans turned their attention to a young woman from the bar who had accompanied them in the cab. They invited her to onion soup at dawn at Les Halles, the vibrant and immense market, always active, which dated back to the twelfth century. Neruda and Hinojosa conferred: they found the young woman neither pretty nor ugly. Her upturned nose conformed to what they thought was a Parisian style. They invited her to their seedy hotel. Neruda maintains he was so exhausted that he just went to his room and fell into his bed, while she followed Álvaro to his room. Later, though, Neruda woke to Álvaro shaking him urgently. “Something’s going on,” he said. “There is something exceptional, extraordinary, about this woman that I couldn’t explain to you. You’ve got to try her right away.”
Neruda wrote:
A few minutes later, the stranger got into my bed, sleepily but obligingly. Making love to her, I received proof of her mysterious gift. It was something indescribable that sprang from deep down inside her, something that went back to the very origins of pleasure, to the birth of a wave, to the genetic secret of Venus. Álvaro was right.
The next morning he pulled me aside during breakfast and warned me in Spanish: If we don’t leave this woman immediately, our trip will be a failure. We wouldn’t shipwreck at sea, but in the bottomless sacrament of sex.
Neruda and Álvaro then decided to shower her with small gifts. Not only did these include flowers and chocolates, but also “half of our remaining francs.” Describing this scene in his memoirs, nearly fifty years later, Neruda notes that the young woman “confessed” that she didn’t work at the Russian bar, “that she had gone there the previous night for the first and only time.” Then, after the soup, flowers, chocolates, and francs, “we got into a taxi with her. The driver was taking us through a nondescript neighborhood when we asked him to stop. We bid her farewell with big kisses and left her there, disoriented but smiling. We never saw her again.”*
* * *
Leaving Paris behind, Neruda would never forget the train that took them to Marseilles, “loaded like a basket of exotic fruit, with a motley crowd of people, country girls and sailors, accordions and songs chorused by everyone in the coach.” From Marseilles, they were off to sea again, across the Mediterranean and down through the Suez Canal. During the trip, Neruda and Hinojosa, who were carrying typewriters, passed the time composing love letters for the sailors to send to their amants back in Marseilles.
The poet had taken a liking to being on the road, and it was mitigating his mood, for now. Travel would become a constant refuge throughout his life. The ship sailed into the Indian Ocean, stopping at Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); Sumatra, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia); Singapore; and finally Rangoon, where Ricardo Neftalí Reyes, a.k.a. Pablo Neruda, assumed the position of Chilean cónsul in October 1927.
At that time, Rangoon was the capital and administrative center of the British colony of Burma, situated opposite India on the northeast corner of the Bay of Bengal in between Bangladesh and Thailand (known as Siam until 1949).
The British in Rangoon and throughout Burma frustrated Neruda. He saw them as imperialistic exploiters overwhelming the colony, “monotone” and ignorant. He could talk to them in his mostly self-taught English, in which he was relatively fluent by this time, but he preferred to engage as little as possible. The British tried to make others feel inferior, Neruda thought. He knew nothing of the native Burmese language, and for the most part it was prohibited throughout the colony, so many Burmese spoke English.
On October 28, shortly after he arrived, Neruda wrote to his sister that Rangoon was boring him terribly. “The women here are black,” he laments, “there’s nothing to worry about, I’m not going to marry.” Despite the progressive class politics he had demonstrated in Claridad and his poetry, Neruda held the conviction of the time and place that nonwhites were beneath him. But that didn’t mean they weren’t sexually interesting; perhaps it made them even more so:
a woman to love, to bed,
silvery or black, virgin or whore,
heavenly orange-colored carnivore,
it mattered not.
Neruda would be more promiscuous during his time on the shores of the Bay of Bengal and later the Arabian Sea than at any other point in his life.
But aside from the thrill of the chase, Neruda was disillusioned. The tropics were sweltering for the Chilean, he knew no one, and his job was devoid of inspiration or stimulation. As Neruda explained in 1971:
At that time, like now, Chile needed raw material to make candles. This raw material is called paraffin wax—I’ll remember its name all my life—and it came from the Petroleum Harmat Oil Company, from Burma. Because of this, Chile needed someone in Burma to take care of the paperwork, to stamp documents. Later that consular invoice system was eliminated and I could go back. But nobody ever went to see me, to consult me on anything, since there were no Chileans and no connections—neither economic nor intellectual—in that country.
This may have been one reason why the Ministry of Foreign Affairs let young poets hold these outposts.
On December 7, he wrote to Yolando Pino Saavedra, a Pedagogy Institute classmate who later became a foremost researcher of Chilean folklore: “The women, indispensable material to the organism, are dark skinned; they wear their hair up, stiff with lacquer; rings in their nose, and a distinct smell. Everything is wonderful the first week. But the weeks, time, passes on!” Five days later, he wrote to the poet Joaquín Edwards Bello, to whom he was quite close, saying that he was growing old in Burma and that tedium was setting in. “This is a beautiful country, but it smells like banishment. One quickly tires of seeing rare customs, of sleeping only with women of color.”
A month later, seeking respite, Neruda and Hinojosa set off on an ambitious trip spanning from January to the end of March. It was illuminating and adventurous right from the start, in Saigon, followed by two days in Bangkok, and then the fantastic, classic eleventh-century Cambodian temples and Buddhist statues in Battambang. Before he left Chile, Neruda had been commissioned by La Nación to compile a series of “Reports from the Orient.” In his chronicle for this trip, he paints his observations—absorptions—of these new worlds in such impressionistic imagery, it’s as if everything in front of him is illusory, surrealistic:
How difficult to leave Siam, to never lose the ethereal, murmuring night of Bangkok, the dream of its thousand-boat-covered canals, its tall enameled temples. What suffering to leave the cities of Cambodia, each with its drop of honey, its monumental Khmerian ruin in the grace of a ballerina’s body. But it’s even more impossible to leave Saigon, relaxed, full of enchantments.
Indochina behind, they continued to Hong Kong, followed by Shanghai and Japan. “Glittering” Hong Kong was full of surprises, alive with sounds of “mysterious exhalations, incredible whistling.” In China, he marveled at how the streets of Asia were “always surprising, magnetic . . . what a bag of extravagant tricks, what a setting for exotic colors and customs, in every district.” Everything seemed a strange brew “stirred by the marvelous fingers of the absurd.”
Yet while these mysterious sights would be fodder for his poetry, upon his return to Rangoon the exhilarations he had experienced in the other parts of Asia soon evaporated. In a letter to his sister, Laura, on the way back from Japan, right after noting how hard it was to explain all the rare things, he complains, “Life in Rangoon is a terrible banishment,” and “I wasn’t born to pass my life in such a hell.” “It’s like living in an oven night and day,” he writes. He longed to leave, to continue his studies in Europe. But his banishment was of his own design; he stayed there.
Creatively, Neruda sought inspiration via letter writing and from the letters he received in turn. His epistolary activity provided a release from the suffocation he was feeling. He began a correspondence with the writer Héctor Eandi, after the Argentine wrote a very positive article about him. On May 11, 1928, in the second of a series of raw and revealing exchanges, Neruda ended a note to him:
Sometimes for long stretches I’m like this, so empty, so vacant, without being able to express anything or check anything inside myself, and a violent poetic disposition never stops to exist in me, each time it leads me to a more inaccessible route, so that a great part of my labor I accomplish with suffering, for the need to occupy a rather remote domain with forces that are surely too weak. I’m not talking to you about doubts, or disoriented thoughts, no, rather of an unsatisfied aspiration, of an exasperated conscience. My books are the heaping, the pile, of these anxieties without exit . . .
Upon returning from their trip, Neruda and Álvaro rented a small house on Dalhousie Street in Rangoon. Neruda was not good company. He was in a bitter mood, wanting only to read and write by himself. Álvaro was in a romantic relationship with a local woman. As he noted in a journal-like chronicle around that time:
