Neruda, page 25
A more renowned literary rival then joined the voices criticizing Neruda. The Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who would win the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature, represented poetry’s old guard. While Jiménez’s poetry was refined, Neruda aimed to transcend formal purity. Yet it was more than just different approaches to poetic style that separated the two. Jiménez called Neruda “a great bad poet.”* This slight seemed to come more from the fact that he was experiencing a changing of the guard in Spanish poetry. He was being left behind, while Lorca’s generation—which included Neruda—was taking center stage.
After Jiménez’s “great bad poet” remark, Neruda and his friends started to prank call Jiménez’s house, hanging up the phone as soon as he answered. But more significantly, Neruda composed a more mature rebuttal to Jiménez’s insult with his pen. The poet and printer Manuel Altolaguirre had just asked Neruda to start and edit a beautifully designed poetry review, featuring the contemporary poets, to be “the finest presentation of the best work in Spain.” Neruda named the magazine Caballo verde para la poesía (Green Horse for Poetry). As small as they may have been, these journals helped set the cultural climate of a period of time. For the first issue, Neruda wrote a manifesto, “On Impure Poetry,” proclaiming the urgent need for a new style, a direct contrast to Jiménez’s beautiful but refined, “pure,” distanced verse. It begins:
It is very appropriate, at certain times of the day or night, to deeply observe objects at rest: the wheels that have covered long, dusty distances, bearing heavy loads of vegetables or minerals, sacks from the coal yards, barrels, baskets, the handles and grips of the carpenter’s tool. The contact of man with the universe exudes from these things a lesson for the tormented poet. The worn surfaces, the wear that hands have inflicted on things, the often tragic and always wistful aura of these objects, lend to reality a fascination not to be taken lightly.
The confused impurity of human beings is displayed in them, the proliferation, materials used and discarded, footprints and fingerprints, the permanent mark of humanity inundating all objects from within and without. That is the kind of poetry we should strive for, worn away as if by acid from the labor of hands, impregnated with sweat and smoke, smelling of urine and lilies, and seasoned by the various professions that operate both within and outside the law.
A poetry impure as old clothes, as a body, with its food stains and shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, vigilance, prophecies, declarations of love and hate, beasts, blows, idylls, manifestos, denials, doubts, affirmations, taxes.
This declaration essentially rebuts Jiménez’s strong advocacy for a “naked” poetry based on the nuances of language and intellect. In contrast, Neruda sought to rehumanize the poem from that form. Times were changing. Neruda’s manifesto quickly influenced many of his Spanish friends and beyond, especially because of the need for turbulent poetry as an expression of the increasingly turbulent circumstances in Spain. The country was experiencing the pains of great political upheaval, bitterly polarizing and well on the road to the civil war. That war would break out just eight months after the essay was published.
The manifesto did not abandon the lyrical material that formed the first parts of Residence. But it did announce his new aesthetic, which was taking shape, influenced by the circumstances of his life in Spain and by the writing of his Spanish friends. He expanded the scope of his poetry to incorporate everything, from political declarations to dreams and prophecies.
Neruda described the elements of a new style of poetry grounded in human experience, an insurgent response to injustice and violence. Neruda was surrounded by leftists doing everything they could to defend the Second Republic against its conservative, right-wing, and fascist enemies. It was against this backdrop that Neruda’s “On Impure Poetry” argued for a dirty poetry, grimy from the hands of the worker, smelling of both “urine and lilies.” Neruda now stressed writing about the real over the ideal, the everyday instead of the extraordinary. It was a complete departure from his poems of the Far East; there was no turning back now for Neruda.
His early 1935 poem “Statute of Wine” shows the sheer departure from any purities of the past:
I speak of things that exist. God deliver me
From inventing things when I’m singing!
* * *
While writing in Spain, inspired by Lorca and others, Neruda became deeply absorbed in reading the work of earlier master poets. He published translations of poems by William Blake and parts of Walt Whitman’s epic “Song of Myself.” He had started to read Whitman when he was fifteen, and at nineteen he proposed and wrote a review in Claridad of a new translation of the “beautiful words of the boy from Camden.” Lorca had begun to idolize Whitman while living in New York six years earlier, after learning from a friend of Whitman’s love for his “comrades” and of his attempt to articulate that love in Leaves of Grass. Lorca’s exalting “Ode to Walt Whitman” is the longest (and most explicit) poem in the book that came from that trip, Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York). But it wasn’t just Whitman’s homosexuality; it was his radical use of free verse, with language that surprises, and “Song of Myself” is a poem of democracy, a poem that dramatizes how one’s imagination fuels creative power. All of this resonated with Neruda’s mood while in Spain, as he too began to see Whitman in a heroic light.
“Song of Myself” was first published in 1855. But the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War six years later had a transformational effect on Whitman and his poetry. The tragedies surrounding him called for a more politically driven voice; his idealistic romanticism was replaced by realism, with which he directly documented what he saw through the poetry of witness, no longer of imagination. Four years after Neruda translated “Song of Myself,” the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War affected Neruda in much the same way.
Neruda would have a lifelong relationship with Whitman. He was a major influence on much of Neruda’s poetry written after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, particularly Canto General. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom claims that Neruda “can be regarded as Whitman’s truest heir. The poet of Canto General is a worthier rival than any other descendant of Leaves of Grass.”* A few years after Canto came out, Neruda told a Continental Cultural Congress in Santiago how much Whitman had meant to him recently, and reprised the bard’s statement from 1871: “I should demand a programme of culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone or for the parlors or lecture rooms, but with an eye to practical life, the west, the workingmen, the facts of farms and jackplanes and engineers.”
It’s for an action of love to my country
that I reclaim you, necessary brother,
old Walt Whitman of the gray hand.
so that with your extraordinary help
verse by verse we kill Nixon, sanguinary
president, at the root.†
* * *
Finally, in September 1935, Residence on Earth was published in Spain, by Cruz & Raya, who not only published the first volume, but a second containing twenty-three poems written since 1931.* Neruda’s new poetry was enormously successful with readers. Most important, the book garnered critical acclaim outside Neruda’s traditional circles. Two months after the book’s publication, the Paris magazine Le Mois proclaimed:
You can be sure that there is no country in Europe where poetry is as prosperous as it is in Spain and Latin America. The young stars of Spanish poetry that have gathered around the master Juan Ramón Jiménez are truly first-rate talent.
However, the most important publication of the year is undeniably the combination of two volumes by the Chilean Pablo Neruda, “Residence on Earth,” an admirable book, the work of a great and true poet, a poet with a powerful, courageous spirit, with a profound and broad vision.
Neruda’s old mentor Gabriela Mistral was also in Madrid, serving as consul. She wrote a rave review of the book that appeared in Chile’s El Mercurio on April 23, 1936, calling Neruda the poet who “discovers and delivers to us the most unsuspected forms of ruin, agony, death and corruption.” Neruda “comes following various ripples of poetic trial runs, like a giant tidal wave that propels the very innards of the ocean onto the coast, where those before him had used nothing but weak, small strokes.” Shortly after the review, Mistral—whom Morla Lynch had described as “magnificent and extraordinary”—fell from grace in Chile when a Santiago journalist published some of her private letters, which outraged Spaniards, Chileans in Spain, and the diplomatic community. In one of them, she wrote to her Chilean friends the poet María Monvel and the critic Armando Donoso:
I still don’t know whether I should tell you about the Spain I know, or let you keep your version of it. The two are so different! . . . For the past two years, I have been living in the midst of an indecipherable people, full of oppositions, absurd fraud . . . It is hungry and too inert to bring about justice; it’s as illiterate as its Arab neighbors (such a sad lot). It’s fractured; today it’s a republic but tomorrow it may be a Philippist monarchy. All the other people look down upon it with condescension and even hate: the French, the English, the Italians, the [Latin] Americans that they call “Spanish Americans.”
The Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs quickly sent Mistral to Portugal and promoted Neruda from cultural attaché to consul in Madrid. It was a matter of time before he too would be in trouble with the ministry, when his new political activities grew loud and controversial.
* * *
Even before the Spanish Civil War broke out, with Hitler and Mussolini gaining power, the rising global fascist threat was alarming progressives around the world. At the same time, the burgeoning Popular Front, the new alliance among Communists, Socialists, and others on the Left, was trying to accelerate its progress toward electoral victories, particularly in France. Toward this end, and as part of a campaign to safeguard culture “from the menace of fascism and war,” the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture was held in Paris in June 1935. It was a star-studded event, with 230 delegates from thirty-eight countries. Neruda attended to represent Chile.
The diverse audience consisted of students, youth, and members of the working class. Speakers included Aldous Huxley, Anna Seghers, Louis Aragon, E. M. Forster, and Bertolt Brecht. So many people converged on the three-thousand-seat Maison de la Mutualité that for many of the sessions, loudspeakers had to be set up outside for everyone who could not get in.
Neruda was not a declared communist yet and was cautious of being partisan, as he was still an official diplomat of the conservative Chilean government. However, he was making a statement just by attending the conference as an official delegate. He made another statement at the end of the conference when he signed his name to a declaration condemning Latin American governments who were repressing intellectuals and writers.
* * *
On this trip, Neruda was finally part of the scene on the Left Bank. Discussions that started at the International Congress continued into the night at sidewalk cafés. He had told his travel companions to be prudent with plans and costs, trying to stretch out their stay with limited funds. This was not just for political and literary reasons; Neruda’s heart was presumably pounding with pure lust. There is a long poem in the third volume of Residence, “The Furies and the Sorrows,” a poem of romantic and erotic love, longing, and, in the end, sadness. Mystified by who the subject might be, in the 1960s scholar Hernán Loyola asked Neruda directly who the feminine figure in the poem was “in the extratextural reality.” He answered, somewhat elliptically: “Carpentier’s woman.”
Through diligent, resourceful research, Loyola deduced that Neruda was referring to the young Parisian Eva Fréjaville. She was supposedly the illegitimate daughter of Diego Rivera and a Frenchwoman. In December 1934, she was with the influential Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier when he came to Madrid. It seems that sparks ignited between her and Neruda, despite his growing devotion to Delia and his respect for Carpentier.
Neruda knew Eva would be in Paris during the conference; perhaps it was at his insistence that Delia stayed in Madrid. While Delia was twenty years older than Neruda, Eva was quite a bit younger, just twenty-two or twenty-three. Delia was beautiful but not erotic. That was not the case with Eva. While she remained devoted to Carpentier, she loved to flirt, to test her power of seduction, not just with Neruda but with others, without committing to any of them. Neruda felt dejected, cheated of the chance to betray the lover with whom he was betraying his wife. His Parisian trip was not an uplifting experience.
* * *
Even with civil unrest in the air, Maruca and Malva Marina aside, Neruda’s life in Madrid was idyllic. Delia was spending so much time at Neruda’s apartment (while maintaining her own) that Carlos Morla Lynch once wrote that she “lives with him, his wife, and the sick baby. A drama that won’t end well.”
Lorca swept in and out of the city with his contagious euphoria, busy directing his theater group, La Barraca. It was made up of university students who traveled to poor villages throughout Spain to perform Cervantes and other classics. Morla Lynch remembered how one evening Lorca burst into a get-together at his house “like a strong gale,” announcing his aim to bring Spanish theater “within reach of the people,” his ideas on how to do it “erupting in his constantly effervescent spirit.” Lorca, so vibrant at this time, was driven by the energy of the Republic and his commitment to addressing social problems through theater.* La Barraca typified the enthusiasm of the young Republic; the government made it a priority to help fund Lorca’s initiative, promoting its own progressive ideals while providing important validation for the participating artists and students.
Neruda, Lorca, and other members of the gang celebrated Christmas 1935 at Delia’s apartment. They decided to feast on a turkey, charging Isaías Cabezón, the Chilean painter, with buying it. He got a live one. Someone suggested they should give the bird a glass of vintage wine so the meat would be juicier. Cabezón took this seriously, or at least acted like he did, for when he finally arrived at Delia’s at ten that night, he confessed he had gone from one bar to another, serving it wine, beer, and vermouth—serving himself as well. The turkey was so big it wouldn’t fit into a normal oven, so they took it to a bakery to roast. They didn’t eat it until two in the morning.
A week later they spent New Year’s partying in the streets. With their jacket collars up high to protect them from the bitter cold that had set in on the city, they went to the Puerta del Sol, the iconic, gracious plaza, where they ate their traditional twelve grapes, one for each month, among thousands of other jubilant Madrileños. There is no record of Maruca being present on either of these nights.
The coming year would not be as festive. Miners were killed in Asturias, a province in northwest Spain. While Alberti and María Teresa León were on a trip to Moscow, Fascists tried to destroy their house. In January 1936, the Second Spanish Republic experienced yet another governmental crisis. The previous fall, two major financial scandals, combined with internal factionalism, had discredited the administration. In the power struggle that followed, parliament was dissolved and national elections were called for February.
The left-wing parties set aside their differences and ran as the Popular Front. Right-wing propaganda labeled the Front a creation of the Soviet-headed Communist International, or Comintern, in an attempt to stir fear of an imminent Moscow-sponsored Spanish revolution. The head of Spain’s Monarchist party, José Calvo Sotelo, called for military force to combat the “red hordes of communism” and warned the nation that if Spaniards did not vote for the conservative National Front, a “Red Flag” would fly over Spain.
On February 16, 1936, the Popular Front won both the popular vote and a plurality in parliament. It was a fragile victory, though; if the right-wing National Front had merged with the center, it would have obtained a slight numerical majority. Neruda and his friends celebrated the victory in a magnificent fiesta at his apartment in La Casa de las Flores.
The day following the elections, rumors of a possible military coup swept through Madrid as Francisco Franco and other generals conspired to overthrow the new government. Franco was detested by the Left for leading a brutal suppression of the miners’ uprising in 1934. He often publicly praised Mussolini.
On February 19, Manuel Azaña assumed power as Spain’s new prime minister. Two days later, Franco was removed from his post as chief of the general staff and ordered to Las Palmas, as commandant general of the Canary Islands. This “banishment” fueled Franco’s hostility toward the new government and his ambitions to overthrow it.
In the early months of 1936, the tension between the Left and the Right in Spain intensified, both in the government and on the streets. In March, members of the Fascist group Falange started to ride ostentatiously through Madrid in squads of motorcars, wielding machine guns, sporadically firing at alleged reds in working-class neighborhoods.* After the Falange attempted the assassination of a Socialist member of parliament, Prime Minister Azaña outlawed the party and jailed much of its leadership. This created further polarization, and the violence continued. By June, many members of the Communist, Socialist, and anarchist parties were publicly promoting a revolution against the failing Republican government, while the right-wing press was instilling in the middle class a fear of a Communist state and promoting the idea that only a military coup could save Spain. The government’s inability to act decisively kept the surging tempers on the Right aflame as the country fell into a state of undeclared civil war.
At the end of June, such was the state of chaos in Madrid that Neruda convinced Maruca that she and the baby would be safer in Barcelona, where the local Chilean consul would take care of them. With his wife and child out of the picture, Neruda and Delia lived together openly, though their time in Madrid was also running out.
On July 11, Lorca and other friends, including Fulgencio Díez Pastor, a Socialist member of parliament, dined at La Casa de las Flores. The events of that day included a group of Falangists temporarily seizing Radio Valencia and broadcasting that the Fascist revolution was on its way. Tough rumors were swirling through Madrid; everyone was on edge. At the dinner Lorca could see the extreme worry that Díez Pastor was exhibiting—and he was a member of parliament; he knew more than everyone else! Lorca was petrified and couldn’t stop asking Díez Pastor question after question: What’s going to happen? What should I do? Will there be a coup? Lorca suddenly yelled, “I’m going to Granada!” “Don’t,” Díez Pastor told him. “You’ll be safer in Madrid.” Other friends would give him similar advice over the coming days.
