Neruda, p.21
Neruda, page 21
When Alberti arrived in Paris in 1931, he told Alejo Carpentier about this “absolutely extraordinary poet” who was serving as a consul in Java and was unknown in Europe, and that he should publish him. Carpentier had fled political repression in Cuba and was straddling the worlds of surrealism and journalism in France. He was working as the editor of a new magazine, collaborating with other stellar Latin American members of his generation residing in Paris. The endeavor was run and funded by the young writer Elvira de Alvear, another recent arrival in Montparnasse. She came from the Argentine bourgeoisie and financed the publication from income she regularly received from back home. As Carpentier recounted later, he wrote to Java, and Neruda sent him the manuscript, whose poetry amazed him. He talked to de Alvear, and they decided to first print some of the poems in the next issue of the magazine and then publish the whole book. There would even be an advance of 5,000 francs. Alberti sent a cable to Neruda with the news. But then, as a repercussion of the Depression, Argentina passed a law restricting the exportation of capital. De Alvear was forced to return home. Neruda never got the francs nor was Residence published in France. Everything seemed to be more of a struggle now—after having book after book come out over the past years, he no longer seemed to be infallible when it came to publishing. Even the fate of de Alvear’s finances seemed like a direct reversal of the good fortune Neruda had when he ran into Alone, just after he got his stock tip money, and the critic agreed to pay off Book of Twilights’ printer.
Neruda kept tight to his stubborn, arrogant conviction of not settling for anything “less” than having the book be published in Spain, wasting three years as he passed up opportunities for paying contracts with solid publishers in Argentina and Chile. He even had his latest (albeit much less significant) work, El hondero entusiasta, published by Nascimento in Santiago without a second thought. Nascimento had now published five books of Neruda’s—perhaps not to the greatest sales volume, but nearly all of them worthy endeavors, and the more important ones made their way to Europe, the United States, and elsewhere.
But after three years, Neruda couldn’t hold back any longer. He was still too arrogant to allow a full release outside of Spain, but he was dying to get something out there, while still holding on to his cards so that he could flush out a noble debut in Europe. He thus arranged with Nascimento to do a limited release of one hundred deluxe copies, with paper from Holland, each signed by the poet himself. For Neruda, this strategy kept the book seemingly within his control. (It was unlike Neruda’s previous books: all those since Twenty Love Poems—venture, El habitante, Anillos, even the new El hondero entusiasta—were selling hundreds of copies each.) And most important, he would still leave open the opportunity for a Spanish publisher to print a full run of popular editions that would be considered the real first edition. These one hundred were more for friends, for the literati, for reviewers. He hoped all of their enthusiasm would create a buzz and attract a Spanish publisher.
But when Nascimento did publish the hundred copies, some critics were unenthusiastic, reacting less to the lines themselves than to Neruda’s whole approach; they felt Neruda’s ego had grown too big, while others were simply jealous. Some were both, such as Pablo de Rokha, one of Neruda’s nemeses throughout his literary life, a poet who amassed a torrential body of work and was important enough to one day have a Santiago high school and neighborhood named after him. De Rokha had already criticized Neruda in print, and now he attacked him again in the newspaper La Opinión, ten days after the publication of the first Residence, audaciously titling the article “Epitaph to Neruda.” “Neruda is the master, the owner and victim of the mask, of that ‘poet’s mask’ that initiates and defines Residencia,” wrote de Rokha. The book’s tone is “excessive and treacherous”; Neruda’s words “hang like rags; the mask is wet, it’s been rained upon inside.”
He was clearly alluding to Neruda’s only major poetry recital since his return, which had been at a theater staged with Asian masks, as if out of a Chinese opera. Neruda had given his reading standing behind one of the giant masks, not once showing his face, as he read the early poems of Residence in a “nasal twangy voice, dragging like a lament.” He had started with the poem “We Together”:
How pure you are in sunlight or at nightfall,
how boundlessly triumphant your white orbit,
and your bosom of bread, atmospheric height,
your crown of black trees, beloved,
and your solitary animal’s nose, a wild sheep’s nose
that smells of shadow and sudden flight.
The reading went on for over an hour, Neruda using little inflection, speaking in “a monochord deep moan,” as one witness described it. After Neruda was done, everyone waited eagerly for the poet to appear onstage. But he didn’t come out to greet the mixture of applause and indifference; he remained behind the mask.
Generally, besides de Rokha, Residence’s first volume found favorable reviews in Chile. Despite some monotone and monotony, readers embraced this surprising poetry’s high-strung intensity, an intensity spun tight by the grips of the new rhetoric, the new way to express oneself in a poem—an intensity that was a driving force through the book and into the readers’ emotional receptors. Neruda had returned to the forefront. His friends considered it a precedent-breaking success. However, it was hard to find a formal nonpartisan review, the most prominent, other than de Rokha’s, being written by either his friends or his devotees.* In 1935, after the second volume was printed, Alone, whose reputation as a literary critic had continued to grow through the years, gave his first full review of the work. It was positive. Alone’s main point was that Neruda’s ability to achieve such an earnest level of authenticity and transparency came from the fact that he had written it with true conviction. Neruda was not afraid to leave his comfort zone, he believed, and this new level of confidence is evident in the poetic forms’ impenetrability. Neruda is no longer seeking clarity in order to be understood. His poetic maturity is evident; his raw evocation comes out complex and dissonant, yet completely naked.
The critical and social reception the limited edition achieved was just what Neruda had envisioned. Now he just needed to take the next step: find a publisher in Spain. And now Neruda needed to take another step as well: find a job. While he was still hoping to work in Spain, with the achievement of Residence under his belt, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs named him to a post in Argentina in August 1933. Four years earlier, he had written to Eandi from Ceylon; two lines after describing how life in Colombo was like death, he asked, “Buenos Aires, isn’t that the name of paradise?”
* * *
The Chilean writer María Luisa Bombal would be a central character in Neruda’s life in Buenos Aires. She had returned to Chile from Europe around the same time that Neruda came back from Asia. Twenty-three at the time, glowing, with short hair, she had become one of Chile’s greatest fiction writers. While studying literature at the Sorbonne, she began experimenting with acting, taking classes at the celebrated École de l’Atelier. When word got back to her family that she had been onstage, which they considered improper, they pressured her to return to Chile. As she disembarked, she spotted her mother and twin sisters in their winged hats and, behind them, a tall and hefty man, twenty-eight years old. This was Eulogio Sánchez Errázuriz, the wealthy grandson of a former president and a pioneer of Chilean aviation. Every move he made seemed to be full of conviction; his voice was firm. He greeted María Luisa and offered to get her luggage. Her sisters explained that he was a new friend of the family. Almost immediately, like many other women, María Luisa fell madly in love with him.
A short but intense romance began, but Sánchez soon withdrew from María Luisa’s aggressiveness. She wrote him letter after letter, tried to approach him again, but it was clear to all but her that Sánchez definitively and irrevocably did not love her and would never love her. He even showed her sisters her letters and asked them to convince María Luisa to lay her passions to rest.
María Luisa was tormented by the loss. One night, trying to normalize relations, Sánchez invited her and her sister Loreto to dinner. He clearly conveyed his desire to have nothing more than a friendship with María Luisa. She left the table, went to his bedroom, searched through his drawers until she found his revolver, and then shot herself in her left shoulder. She would spend a month recovering in Santiago’s Hospital del Salvador.
The Bombal twins had met Neruda shortly after his return from the Far East. One day they brought María Luisa to his house, believing the two might get along. They were right. A friend who was at the encounter said, “Pablo adored her immediately.” He quickly came to feel that she was “the only woman with whom I can seriously talk about literature.” Despite her suffering over Sánchez, her intelligence, culture, humor, and youth captivated Neruda. (He was also impressed by her sister Loreto. In this case, the feelings weren’t platonic. According to María Luisa and others, he had fallen in love with her. And there was talk that the two had an affair that lasted until he left for Argentina.)
Having been away in Paris, and rarely in Santiago before she left, María Luisa knew little of the city’s writers and intellectuals who congregated around Neruda as if he were royalty. He introduced her to his friends, who found her elegant, gracious, bright, and creative.
María Luisa also became good friends with Maruca (Maruca’s only friend, other than Juanita Eandi in Argentina). As María Luisa’s mental instability coincided with Neruda’s new consular appointment to Buenos Aires, the poet invited her to live with them in Buenos Aires, thinking a fresh start and some distance would do her good. It did.
While his position still had the tag of consul “of choice, by election,” it was beginning to look like he was establishing an actual career path within the diplomatic corps that would provide more than just small stipends. Still, when he first showed up to take his post in Buenos Aires, the cónsul general de Chile, Socrates Aguirre, announced, “You will be responsible for making the name of Chile shine.”
“How?” Neruda asked, somewhat dubiously.
“By establishing friendly relations with writers and intellectuals. Your job is culture. Myself and another functionary will deal with all the diplomatic bureaucracy,” he explained.
These new, direct relations not only would help Neruda’s country to shine, but would brighten his own disposition.
The concrete experiences of fraternity that Neruda had upon his return to Chile and now in Argentina breathed new life into his sense of self and well-being. It allowed him to become an active participant in what would soon be an intense Buenos Aires social life and engage more fully in the world.
It started with Héctor Eandi, no longer just a sympathetic person on the other side of the world whom Neruda had never seen, connected only by pen or transcontinental cable; now they were face-to-face, tangible friends. Neruda was free of the disconnectedness he felt in Asia, where most of his fleeting social interactions were with people for whom he felt little more than disdain.
Two years earlier, shortly after getting married, Neruda and Maruca had sent a package of gifts to Eandi and his family from Batavia, including a pair of pajamas for his young daughter, Violna, and a Javanese hand fan for his wife, Juanita. Now all five sat in one another’s company, delighted to be together, the adults conversing for hours. (However, when the conversation turned to children, and the Eandis asked the Nerudas about their plans, they answered silently, through vague smiles followed by blank faces.)
Eandi was a literary critic at heart. Neruda first became aware of him after Eandi wrote an adulatory piece on his poetry. Now he wanted to do what he could to assure that Neruda would be well received in Argentina, at least by those concerned with literature. Neruda was already a familiar name among poetry readers on the eastern side of the Andes. An edition of Twenty Love Poems, the first book of his to be published outside of Chile and the one that would help catapult him to international fame, had recently been released in Buenos Aires. And just upon his arrival, the legendary Argentine magazine Poesía published four of his Residence poems. Eandi promoted these publications in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación on October 8, 1933, two months after Neruda’s arrival.
Neruda’s four major books, The Book of Twilights, Twenty Love Poems, venture of the infinite man, and Residence bring together works of great maturity, in which a profoundly lyrical nature is evident, served by an astonishing technique . . . His language is so deep, so rich and involved with humanity; there’s a violence of passion in his words; he knows how to get to the root of emotion, that his verses powerfully create their own ambiance.
Besides Eandi’s companionship, Neruda rapidly made new friends in Argentina; Maruca’s and his large, modern apartment quickly became a social hub for the Buenos Aires literary world. It looked out over the “Broadway of Buenos Aires,” Corrientes Street, an artery of the city’s life and culture that never slept. It was a sparkling spine of the city where people forgot about the financial crisis and enjoyed themselves with abandon.
The panoramic views from their twentieth-floor apartment were fantastic, such a striking contrast to the walled gray confines around their Catedral Street apartment in Santiago. Yet even in such cheerful surroundings, despite all the advancement he had made, Neruda was still not impervious to depression. He became despondent again, his mood disordered despite the fact that he was meeting new and old friends in the cosmopolitan city, all eager to spend time with him.
Two of the renowned figures with whom Neruda, and sometimes Maruca, spent a great deal of time were the poets Norah Lange and Oliverio Girondo, a legendary couple who would eventually marry. Sara “La Rubia” (the Blonde) Tornú, an important progressive promoter of literary and artistic culture, also became a close confidante, as did José González Carbalho, lyrical poet, journalist, and principal founder of the influential magazine Martín Fierro.* Borges was in Buenos Aires during this period as well, but he was noticeably absent from Neruda’s social scene.†
The first month in Buenos Aires was taxing for Neruda. One thing weighing on him was the failure of Residence to take off. Nearly half a year had passed since that first printing of a hundred copies in Santiago, and despite the generally good reception, despite his idea that the print run would be enough only for friends and influential readers, there turned out to be plenty of copies to spare; they just weren’t really selling. That heavy negative feeling he had felt in one shape or form for so much of his life descended on him once again, just as it started to seem that he had risen above it. He couldn’t pretend he’d completely escaped it. He had to have felt a sense of helplessness as he looked out from his enviable apartment with Buenos Aires throbbing at his feet, as he recalled the intimate, direct connections with such stellar new friends. This despondency is articulated in one of his true classics, “Walking Around,” one of three morose poems written during the first month or so he was in Buenos Aires: “Comes a time I’m tired of being a man.”
The original title for the poem was in English, not out of snobbery or affectation, but to tie it to James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the main character, Leopold Bloom, walks around Dublin, free-associating throughout the course of an “ordinary day” in 1904. The Irishman’s influence on Neruda had grown; Neruda had read Ulysses in Sri Lanka and now translated some of Joyce’s early poems for an Argentine magazine.
“Walking Around” shows Neruda at the height of his skills. The poem’s power comes from Neruda’s novel implementation of a constellation of linguistic and symbolic materials so that the poem still seems vanguard today:
Comes a time I’m tired of being a man.
Comes a time I check out the tailor’s or the movies
shriveled, impenetrable, like a felt swan
launched into waters of origin and ashes.
A whiff from the barber shops has me wailing.
All I want is a break from rocks and wool,
all I want is to see neither buildings nor gardens,
no shopping centers, no bifocals, no elevators.
Comes a time I’m tired of my feet and my fingernails
and my hair and my shadow.
Comes a time I’m tired of being a man.*
* * *
María Luisa Bombal’s presence in Buenos Aires was comforting for Neruda, and the feeling was mutual, in a platonic way for both. Her smooth, natural creativity and warmth helped him, as he, likewise, helped her. She poured herself into her writing, retracing her agony and desires of the past years in La última niebla (The Final Mist). A precursor to magical realism, it put her on the path to becoming one of the few globally recognized female Latin American novelists. It is the first book in Latin American literature that narrates the experience of an orgasm from the perspective of a woman, the author herself. The novel was published in 1935, two years after she moved in with the Nerudas.
She wrote most of it in the apartment’s bright, enormous kitchen. The floor was marble, edged in fine blue ceramic. Both the floor and the walls were brilliant white—an ideal workspace. “What do you think?” María Luisa would ask, reading a few sentences from her manuscript. Neruda hesitated to give her advice, for he understood how her mind worked. When he did make suggestions, she would consider them, but she was clear on what she wanted to express, just as Neruda had sensed. “Don’t ever let anyone correct you,” he told her. Bombal’s accounts give a rare insight into Neruda, the disinterested (and objective) friend and editor.
