Neruda, p.17
Neruda, page 17
Our friendship with Pablo was visibly getting colder. All on the part of him. It had gotten to the point that he had converted into my declared enemy. In the things that affected both of us, he acted as if I didn’t exist. One night I came back to the house and was in the mood to chat. Pablo grabbed a book, and answering me with a bad attitude, he looked for a way to end my superficial and somewhat alcoholic chat. I tried to interest him in various subjects. Nada. So I told him, “I’m going to Calcutta tomorrow.” I didn’t have the slightest inclination to make such a trip all of a sudden. But my goal was to make him talk. His only remark was “That’s crazy.” And he kept reading.
Álvaro had been intruding on the irritable poet’s personal space. Having effectively dismissed him—Álvaro did end up going to Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he tried to make it in its film industry—Neruda was now alone, which was what he seemed to want. Shortly, though, he would begin to complain constantly about the solitude he felt. His isolation was caused by his mental state, to a great degree, as much as he would blame the culture and environment. As always, his practice of writing poetry would serve as a balm for the utter desolation of his mind. Neruda sieved his mental currents as he poured his soul into his poetry. He constructed an almost unprecedented, intricate, reflective set of symbols by giving a voice to the unconscious. This work produced the majority of the first book of Residence on Earth.
In August 1928, Neruda wrote to his old FECh friend José Santos González Vera:
I suffer, I’m so anguished with horrible discoveries, the weather burns me, I curse my mother and grandmother, I spend whole days conversing with my cockatoo, I pay an elephant in rent . . . my desires are influenced by storms and lemonade . . .
I’ve already told you: great inactivity, but only on the surface; deep down, I was unable to stop my thoughts from churning . . . My scant latest works, since a year ago, have reached great perfection (or imperfection), but within what I strived for. It’s to say, I have passed a literary limit that I never believed I was capable of surpassing, and in truth my results surprise me and console me. My new book will be named Residence on Earth and there’ll be forty poems in verse that I hope to publish in Spain. It all has equal movement, equal pressure, and is developing in the same region of my head, like the same class of insistent waves.
For almost his entire life, Neruda was a tremendously prolific writer, of both poetry and prose. It wasn’t a question of him consciously sacrificing quality for quantity, but that he naturally generated so much in a stretch that a superior level couldn’t always be maintained. Interestingly, it was when he was in Burma, suffering through one of his most frustrating, unproductive periods, through lentitude, with his mental environment restraining the flow of his creative energy and forcing him to be more deliberate, that he wrote this book of unprecedented “great perfection.” As he was forced to extract his poems from the “churning,” the results were consistently of outstanding quality. Many readers and critics claim that, while they might not all be masterpieces in themselves, there are simply no “bad” or “weak” poems in Residence on Earth from the time he wrote in Asia. One would be hard-pressed to make that statement about any of his other books.
Returning to Burma from his trip to Saigon and Japan and the other stops in between, Neruda had written Laura, highlighting the challenge of finding language to express the fantastical elements he was observing, experiencing: “It seems difficult to tell you all about the infinite rare things that fill this side of the world; everything is distinct: the customs, the religions, the clothing, they all seem to belong to a country seen in dreams rather than in everyday reality.”
Neruda, compositionally, was developing a way to interpret these “exotic colors,” these “infinite rare things,” these “strange brews stirred by the marvelous fingers of the absurd,” as he had described them in his dispatch to La Nación. He was witnessing the wonders of the world in front of him, while also experiencing and interpreting them internally in his mind.
And dreams. During this period, he frequently refers to dreams, be it in his “Reports from the Orient” or when he writes, from an opium den, to a friend in Chile that he’s working on a book that will be called “Nocturnal Collection”—his original title for Residence on Earth—and he’s confident “that it will express huge swaths of my inner world.”
Just as venture of the infinite man was a variation of surrealism and other styles that he crafted on his own to suit himself, he had now developed that further: the poems of this first volume of Residence on Earth redefined Spanish poetry with Neruda’s individualized form of surrealism. He had created a new rhetoric distinctly his own, quickly labeled Nerudismo, which featured a transformational use of expressive symbols with esoteric images. With them, he was able to put a language to all the dreams, to the strange things, both external and internal and in between, in order to find a way to express them to himself, to his readers.
This new ars poetica is described in the Residence poem bearing that title in the new book:
Between shadow and space, between harnesses and virgins,
endowed with a singular heart and fatal dreams,
impetuously pale, withered in the forehead
and in mourning like an angry widower every day of my life,
oh, for every drink of invisible water I swallow drowsily
and with every sound I take in, trembling,
I feel the same missing thirst and the same cold fever,
an ear being born, an indirect anguish,
as if thieves were arriving, or ghosts,
and inside a long, deep, hollow shell,
like a humiliated waiter, like a bell gone a bit hoarse,
like an old mirror, like the smell of an empty house
where the guests come back at night hopelessly drunk,
and there’s an odor of clothes thrown on the floor, and an absence of flowers
—or maybe somehow a little less melancholic—
but the truth is, suddenly, the wind lashing my chest,
the infinitely dense nights dropped into my bedroom,
the noise of a day burning with sacrifice
demand what there is in me of the prophetic, with melancholy
and there’s a banging of objects that call without being answered,
and a restless motion, and a muddled name.
Today the book remains a powerful articulation of the poet’s endeavor. The writer Jim Harrison notes in the introduction to New Directions’ 2004 centennial edition of Residence on Earth, “In every line you trace with great difficulty the bruised consciousness that produced it because unlike most poetry it proceeds from the inner to the world outside the poet.” The Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ariel Dorfman, who grew up in Chile, commented:
Whenever I’m feeling a need to understand the turbulence, the chaos of life, how life erupts in different ways and in the everyday, I always go to Residencia en la tierra, and I’ll go to it continually. And especially during my adolescence, my late adolescence [in the 1960s], I felt that to be very good company for me, because it is very much the way in which Neruda was referring to a reality in Latin America where everything is unsettled, where there is no center, there is no core, there is no foundation, and yet the foundation is in the words themselves.
Yet it took time to elicit such a positive reaction—or any reaction—from his contemporaries. It was a bit too avant-garde for the mainstream reader of the time. Just as he did with Twenty Love Poems, Neruda struggled to convince a publisher to take it on. The battle with this book would be tougher, and the response not nearly as sensational as when his first masterpiece was released.
* * *
Though Neruda was excited by the developments with his writing, more mundane matters required the poet’s attention. In June, he sent an urgent cable to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying that he’d been without funds for two months. In a letter to Héctor Eandi, Neruda wrote:
Consuls like me—“honorary”—receive a miserable salary, the lowest of the entire staff. The lack of money has made me suffer immensely, and even now my life is full of ignoble conflicts. I receive 166 American dollars a month, and here that is about the salary of a third-rate pharmacy employee. And worse yet, this salary depends on the income of the consulate, so if there are no exports to Chile one month, there is no money for me.
Eandi worked toward finding someone to publish Residence on Earth in Buenos Aires, but for Neruda, Argentina “seems to me still too provincial . . . My greatest interest is to publish them in Spain.” Not only did he want to get published in Spain, but he wanted to live there too, to be transferred out of his “banishment” in the Far East and obtain a post in Europe. Though he had never met him, Neruda began writing the Chilean writer-diplomat Carlos Morla Lynch, who served in a variety of positions in the Chilean embassy in Madrid. Their mutual friend Alfredo Cóndon, of the Russian bar incident, put them in touch. Neruda’s letters were open and intimate from the start:
Carlos Morla, about me feeling lonely, I feel lonely. I would like to be taken to Spain. Is there any prospective consulate there? What do I have to do for the department to transfer me? Life here is so terribly dark. For years I have been dying of asphyxia, from disgust. Where’s the remedy? I’d like to live in some little town in Europe, eternally, as long as my body cooperates. Is that possible? Could you and the ambassador do something for me?
The ministry heard Neruda’s plea and assigned him to a post in Ceylon.
According to Neruda, that exit was expedited by a dangerous turn in a dramatic relationship he had with a Burmese woman in Rangoon a couple of months before he left. Her name was Josie Bliss. She dressed like an Englishwoman, and, in his memoirs, Neruda described her as “a species of Burmese panther” and a “love terrorist.”
Josie Bliss was one of the most intriguing and exciting characters in Neruda’s life, especially as described in his memoirs. Seven or eight of his poems allude to her. She was one of six women to have an entire chapter devoted to her in a book called Los amores de Neruda (The Loves of Neruda), by Inés María Cardone, spanning his entire life. Yet there’s a possibility that she was nothing more than an eccentric invention. Josie Bliss may not have existed at all, except in Neruda’s writings and a few anecdotes he told friends later on.
Perhaps Neruda invented her evocative name to embellish his story, or perhaps her name was of her own choosing; locals of that generation often adopted English names so they could assimilate more into the colonial economy. To this day no one knows her real name, and there is no official trace of any “Josie Bliss.” She was supposedly an erratic woman, and at that time in Burma, she could have fallen through the “official” cracks. But no one has ever come forward with proof of her existence. There are no photographs. And while it is not surprising that he wouldn’t mention her in any of his letters to his sister and mother, it is puzzling that someone who took up so much of his emotional time and energy didn’t even once appear in all the frank correspondence he had with Héctor Eandi.
In her study “Chasing Your (Josie) Bliss: The Troubling Critical Afterlife of Pablo Neruda’s Burmese Lover,” Roanne Kantor writes, “Neruda and generations of critics analyzing his life and work have filled reams of paper with descriptions of Josie as exotic, passionate, animalistic and homicidally jealous. Behind all these descriptions, however, is an absolute void: we lack not just the archival evidence to corroborate this particular version of Josie, but the evidence to suggest that there was ever any Josie at all.”
Their romance was one of furious physical chemistry. Neruda’s descriptions of Josie Bliss, mainly in his memoirs written decades after the encounters, stretch credulity: her obsessive jealousy and possessiveness, how she would erupt into tantrums when he received telegrams from back home and sometimes find them first and hide them without opening them, how “she glowered at the air I breathed.”
Sometimes a light would wake me up, a ghost moving behind the mosquito net. It was she, dressed in white, brandishing her long and sharpened indigenous knife. It was she, passing entire hours pacing around my bed without having decided to kill me yet or not. “When you die my fears will end,” she said to me. The next day she would celebrate mysterious rites to guarantee my fidelity.
It is not impossible that there was an extremely tempestuous, young, emotionally unstable woman whom he appealed to. However, Neruda exaggerated and invented a great deal throughout his writings, throughout his life. Also, her depiction fits into problematic narratives concerning race, gender, and the Orient that developed during those years, showing fundamental aspects of how he saw himself and the world around him at the time. Josie is eccentric and exotic and of the same skin color as all the other local women he slept with, but she also has some standing, wears English clothes, and has her own place for them to live. He describes her as a true lover, someone he seriously would have considered marrying, unlike the way he perceived other native Burmese women. In other words, she embodies a fantasy, an acceptable woman on which Neruda can project all his racialized—and racist—fetishes.
George Orwell’s debut novel, Burmese Days, published in English in 1934, is a model from which Neruda may have further developed the character in later years. Orwell’s Burmese femme fatale character, Ma Hla May, closely matches Josie. Wrapped in animalistic comparisons as well, at times Ma Hla May is like a kitten; other times she’s a worm. Just like Josie, who uses Western clothes to try to hide her true identity, Ma Hla May uses white face powder. Ma Hla May is also outlandishly jealous and sometimes suicidal.
The prototypical “Oriental Woman,” in a Western writer’s eyes at the time, as laid out by the eminent postcolonial theorist Edward Said, was docile, graceful, and sexually pliant. Or, in the words of Kantor, Oriental women were seen as “‘wise,’ but paradoxically intellectually innocent to the point of naïveté or even stupidity, while animalistic in her hygiene and living arrangements, and emotionally volatile, leading to outbursts of violent, masochistic, and ‘fatal’ behavior.” This is Josie Bliss, as Neruda portrays her, to a tee.
The prose poem “The Night of the Soldier” is the first piece thought to have a relation to Josie Bliss. The speaker approaches native “girls with your eyes and hips, beings in whose hair shines a flower yellow as lightning.” As if he never had such a chance back in Chile, he uses their bodies as a classroom, a laboratory, a mirror. He wants to remove their colored necklaces “and examine, because I want to discover myself before an uninterrupted and compact body, and not to mitigate my kiss.”
It does seem from his poems and other expressions that the approximately two-month period during which the supposed Josie Bliss affair took place was one of furious, raw, and uninhibited sexual activity for Neruda, with at least one woman, opening up a new level of eroticism within himself. These experiences, combined with his new environment, affected his poetry, heightening the explicitness of both its content and its imagery.
“The Young Monarch” features a clear view of the Josie Bliss character. In this short prose poem, he “wants to marry the most beautiful woman in Mandalay.” (Mandalay was the capital of Burma before the British took over, the epicenter of the country’s culture.) She is “a lovely girl with little feet and a big cigar.” She has amber flowers in her “cylindrical” black hair. She lives dangerously; she is the daughter of the king; she is his “tiger.” Yet after he kisses her coiled hair, the speaker weeps right away for his “absent one”—not this woman, but Albertina, perhaps. It is left uncertain whether the speaker ever marries his bride, or whether he really wants to.
As the narrative progressed, through the poems he wrote and later in his memoirs, by the time Neruda left Burma he was calling himself a widower. The separation from Josie Bliss is marked by the fantastical poem “Widower’s Tango,” where Josie is no longer the enhanced princess; now she is the “malignant”—and she hasn’t actually died.
Josie Bliss would have “ended up killing me,” Neruda wrote in his memoirs. When he received official notice to transfer to a new post in Ceylon, he used it as his chance to flee from her. He prepared for his departure in secret, and then, “abandoning my clothes and my books” so she wouldn’t detect that something was awry, “I left the house as usual and boarded the ship that was to carry me far away.”
In the literary sense, at least, the poem “Widower’s Tango” acts as a letter of explanation to Josie that he never sent. After receiving his transfer from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, before he took the boat to Ceylon, he spent “two months of life” in Calcutta, from November 1928 until the end of that year. (He reunited there with Hinojosa.) “Widower’s Tango” was dated “Calcutta, 1928.” It became something of a cult classic among those familiar with Neruda’s work. Shortly after Residence on Earth was published in Madrid, Guillermo de Torre highlighted “Widower’s Tango” as “profound.” In 2004, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote that the poem sends “a shock down my spine,” producing that “elated sense of disquiet and felicitous astonishment into which all absolute masterworks plunge us.”
It is the potency of this poem that more than anything has perpetuated the myth of Josie Bliss, enthralling reader after reader, generation after generation. The poem is intricately structured, combining compelling sentiment with provocative imagery. It is similar to many of his letters to Albertina, in that he weaves statements of his lingering passion for her with harsh words of degradation.
The poem begins with “Oh Maligna”—the Malignant, the Evil One—
by now you must have found the letter, you must have cried with fury,
and you must have insulted the memory of my mother,
calling her rotten bitch and mother of dogs,
you must have drunk alone, all by yourself, the twilight tea,
looking at my old shoes empty forever . . .
As the poem continues, the distance he’s put between them becomes troubling. He misses the domestic life they shared: “there are no hangers in my room, no pictures of anyone on the walls.” Then reflections of his projections of her as the classic masochistic, violent “fatal woman”:
