Neruda, page 31
And to those who denied you in their rotten laurel,
on American soil, the space that you cover
with your fluvial corona of bled rays,
let me cast them scornful oblivion
because they want to mutilate me with your absence.
Neruda refused to have his own poems included in Laurel. The 1,134-page anthology included his friends Alberti, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Altolaguirre (the printer of Spain in the Heart), and Lorca. The bottom of its last page reads: “(The authors had included the poets Pablo Neruda and Léon Felipe in this anthology. While it was at the printers, these gentlemen asked the editors that their works be excluded. Regretfully, we complied with their wishes.)”
Paz wrote years later:
There was a change after that. He began to use the same disparaging terms for both “pure poets” and Trotskyites. [Paz was a Trotskyite himself, opposed to Stalin’s leadership.] Once I dared to defend [both of] them; he looked at me with surprise, almost incredulously, and then he responded harshly. We didn’t talk about the subject again, but I felt that after that, he thought of me as untrustworthy. I had fallen from his grace.
Indeed, when a banquet in honor of Neruda happened to be given just days after the publication of Laurel, the tensions came to a head. Neruda appeared to be uncharacteristically drunk that evening. At one point he told the others sitting with him at the table of honor, “I would like to say hello to Octavio.” Paz was sitting at one of the enormous tables on the other side of the room. José Luis Martínez, who would become an illustrious leader of several Mexican cultural institutions, went to get him. But when Paz arrived to greet Neruda, he was met with a sudden dismissal: “I don’t say hello to faggots,” Neruda told him. “I call you a faggot because you’re allied with those sons of bitches, those faggots [Bergamín and the other editors of Laurel].” The insult was so distasteful that it unnerved Delia, who turned to Neruda and asked, “Pablo, what are you doing?”
As he said his good-byes at the end of the night, he sarcastically complimented Paz on his shirt, saying it was “whiter than [his] conscience.” He then insulted Paz’s mother and grabbed Paz’s shirt so strongly that he tore part of the collar. A rant on the authors of the “damned anthology” followed.
Later that night, Neruda told the Spanish poet Juan Larrea: “I don’t know what you will think, Juan. But I’ll tell you that to me, poetry doesn’t interest me now. From now on I think I will dedicate myself to politics and seashell collection.” Poetry for Neruda, however, was inescapable; it was his main outlet for political expression. But Neruda’s comment to Larrea is telling of his ambition to become more active politically off the written page.
* * *
The second half of the third volume of Residence on Earth moves from Spain to the Russian front. In the summer of 1942, Hitler began a siege on the industrial city of Stalingrad. The siege was one of the most pivotal and bloodiest battles of the war. Stalin forbade civilians from fleeing on order of being shot; he put them to work barricading and setting up defenses. A major bombardment by Nazi planes caused a fierce firestorm to rage through the city; thousands died and the city was left in ash and rubble. Savage fighting continued. Tanks rolled out of factories and into battle so quickly they weren’t even painted. Over half a million soldiers died in the battle, while the total casualties were near two million.
Communists and others all over the world were pleading for the Allies to open a second front and help defend Russia. To this end, Neruda wrote a long “Song to Stalingrad”:
Russia, today you know loneliness and cold.
When thousands of howitzers shatter your heart,
Stalingrad, when scorpions with crime and venom
come to gnaw on your insides,
New York dances, London meditates, and I say “merde,”
because my heart can’t stand any more and our
hearts can’t stand more, they can’t
in a world that lets heroes die alone.
You leave them alone? Now they’ll come for you!
You leave them alone?
Do you want life
to flee to the tomb, and that the smiles of men
will be erased by the latrine and the cavalry?
Why don’t you respond? . . .
Neruda wrote this poem to raise the public’s consciousness and inspire activism from the grassroots, from the proletariat to the intellectual. He first read it at the electricians’ union theater in Mexico City. The workers were so inspired they made posters of the poem and put them up throughout the capital. The poem quickly spread north, to the United States and Canada, and across the ocean.
But many critics quickly came out against Neruda’s political poetry, and, once again, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was uncomfortable with his public remarks. In defiance of the criticism, Neruda wrote “New Love Song for Stalingrad”:
I wrote about the weather and about water,
I described mourning and its bruise-colored metal,
I wrote about the sky and the apple,
now I write about Stalingrad.
The rhyme scheme is lost in translation; the second line always rhymes with the fourth’s “Stalingrado.”* The poem continues for another twenty-seven strophes, each one pounding the name “Stalingrado” into the reader’s mind, reinforced by the powerful rhyme.
Reviewing the first English translations of Residence on Earth—all three volumes—the New York Times claimed that Neruda “reaches a peak of fervor in two long poems to Stalingrad. In fact, he appears to communicate his convictions most trenchantly when he is writing of the great events of his generation.”†
* * *
In January 1943, after over a year of intense pressure from the United States, Chile finally ended its neutrality and broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, Japan, and Italy. Shortly after, Neruda was invited by the U.S. State Department to participate in “Night of the Americas,” a program of song, dance, and music by celebrated American and Latin American artists. The Council for Pan-American Democracy was the stated organizer.
The event was hosted at the large Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld Theatre), a significant Broadway venue, on February 14. Neruda had now, even in the United States, become a headliner. The ad for the event in the New York Times theater listings read:
NIGHT OF THE AMERICAS
Principal Speakers
Vicente LOMBARDO TOLEDANO * Pablo NERUDA
President, Confederation Latin American Workers * Great Chilean
Poet Consul General to Mexico
Langston Hughes was one of the emcees.
Neruda told the crowd about Talcahuano’s coal mines, where, when the first Soviet boat came to Chile, the miners climbed up onto the hills at night and used their lanterns to cast signals out to the Soviet sailors below, a greeting of “international fraternity.” He ended his speech with the conclusion that “all countries must search for each other beneath the stars to unite on the sea.”
Outside of the event, talking to the press, Neruda made a push for his country to fully renew its relations with Russia, which “will definitely be in Chile’s interest.” His words immediately filled the papers back home. Once again, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed its continued displeasure that, as consul, he would make such inappropriate public statements, especially in an international setting. Tension grew on both sides.
* * *
In March, Delia and Neruda headed to Washington, D.C., where Neruda was received as a celebrity poet-dignitary, with members of Washington’s cultural and political elite eager to meet him. The Washington Post referred to Neruda as “the outstanding Spanish poet of his day.” He was feted at the Chilean embassy and gave a lecture at the Pan-American Union (now the Organization of American States). Attorney General Francis Biddle invited Neruda to his home for tea; his wife, Katherine Garrison Chapin, was a poet and literary patron. He was invited to the Library of Congress by the chief librarian, the poet Archibald MacLeish, who had been picked by FDR to push a progressive agenda. Among other activities, Neruda signed the library’s holding of the fifth of the five hundred copies of Spain in the Heart printed by Manuel Altolaguirre and the Republican soldiers.*
On March 19, 1943, Carlos Morla Lynch, now part of the Chilean delegation in Switzerland, sent a diplomatic telegram to Santiago: “Señora Neruda advises from Holland that her little daughter died March 2nd, without suffering. She urges that her father be advised. She wants to reunite with her husband as soon as possible.” There is no record of the poet demonstrating any strong emotion upon hearing the news. None of his friends remembered him talking about Malva Marina much. While he had just written a poem on Tina Modotti’s death, as he had done previously for the deaths of other friends, Neruda wrote nothing upon the death of his daughter.
Nine days later, another death occurred that seemed to have a greater emotional impact on Neruda than that of his daughter. On March 28, Miguel Hernández, the young Spanish poet Neruda had urged Octavio Paz to include in Laurel, died of untreated tuberculosis in jail in Alicante, Spain. It was the twelfth prison he had been held in during the previous three years. Neruda, Delia, and many others had begged the Catholic Church to intervene on his behalf, to no avail. Some of Hernández’s greatest poetry had been composed during his final years, his last poem scribbled next to his bed on the prison wall: “Farewell, brothers, comrades, friends: Give my good-byes to the sun and the wheat fields.” Neruda and Delia were anguished by his death; they felt they should have done more to prevent it. Their grief fueled their compromiso politico, their personal political commitment.
Two months later, Neruda received a telegram from Morla Lynch reiterating that Maruca wanted to return to Chile and that Neruda needed to get her a Chilean passport. Neruda’s response was calculated: “In spite of the fact that I appreciate Ambassador Barros’s interest, I lament that I must manifest that I do not want my ex-wife to return to Chile and that I’ll suspend her monthly stipend if she does so.”
Indeed, Neruda had already begun divorce proceedings, even before Malva’s death. In his archives is a receipt from a Mexican lawyer for the sum of fifteen pesos for a certified translation of their marriage act from Dutch to Spanish. Neruda petitioned a judge near Cuernavaca for the dissolution of his marriage to Maruca. There, as in other parts of Mexico at the time, legislation had been enacted to expedite divorces, partially out of progressive ideals, partially to attract foreigners and the fees they’d pay for an easy and quick divorce.
His lawyers printed a legal notice in a small newspaper addressed to “Sra. María Antonia Hagenaar,” stating that contested divorce proceedings had been “initiated against you by Neftalí Ricardo Reyes for irreconcilable differences,” and that “you are summoned to respond in person to this suit within three days of this publication.” If she did not respond within this time frame, she would lose her opportunity to contest the divorce. Considering that Maruca was in Nazi-occupied Holland at the time and unable to travel with her sick daughter, not to mention the probability that she never even saw the notice, it was virtually impossible for her to respond in time.
Neruda would be granted the divorce, and in the charming pueblo of Tetecala, in the shadows of the Xochicalco pyramid, at one o’clock on July 2, 1943, Ricardo Neftalí Reyes Basoalto married Delia del Carril Iraeta. Despite the heat and mosquitoes, they held a lunch outside for guests, and drank and sang and read poetry until nightfall. Pablo gave his new wife a necklace of Oaxacan silver. He announced that he had found in Delia that which all his friends put together could not give him.
* * *
A tragic incident in Brazil accelerated Neruda’s involvement in politics beyond his consular role. In those years, Brazil was ruled by a right-wing dictatorship that had outlawed all leftist political activity. In 1935, Luís Carlos Prestes, the Brazilian “cavalier of hope,” as Neruda called him, had been arrested and tortured. His mother, who had fled to Spain, was now in Mexico. Neruda had been helping her to get Prestes released when she died in June 1943. Former Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas telegraphed Brazil’s dictator, Getúlio Vargas, to let Prestes out of jail to attend his mother’s funeral, with a personal guarantee that he’d return to prison, but Vargas refused. The funeral turned into a mass protest, with intellectuals and workers marching side by side in the procession. Neruda read a long poem, “Harsh Elegy,” which became part of The Third Residence. The Brazilian ambassador to Mexico was incensed by Neruda’s words and complained to the Chilean government. A right-wing newspaper in Mexico City published Neruda’s response:
As the consul general of Chile (and not a diplomatic representative), my duty is to work for the strengthening of cultural and trade relations between Mexico and my country. But as a writer, my duty is to defend freedom as an absolute norm of the civil and human condition, and neither protests nor incidents of any kind will change my actions or my poetry.
It was time. Neruda decided to return to Chile and relieve himself of his consular position. His activism had made it impossible for him to serve any longer.
From the high plateaus of Mexico, from his trip to Central America, and despite the distraction of the European situation, he felt a growing urge to write explicitly against the injustices he was witnessing in an ever-broadening context. Toward the end of his stay, he began to find the lyrical forms and tools with which to reorient himself, away from his European focus, toward an expansion of his Canto general de Chile project. These poems marked the genesis of Neruda’s embrace of using the canvas of the Americas to contextualize his concerns, a canvas he discovered when he looked out from the heights of Machu Picchu. His use of the great liberator of the Americas as the vehicle for “Song for Bolívar” is an early example.
At the beginning of the epic, he must show he is fully integrated into that canvas. He must establish that he has the impassioned heart and poetic skill to transform all that history, the geography, the people, into powerful lyrics of revelation and change. He asserts this in his poem “América, I Don’t Invoke Your Name in Vain.” It first appeared in the Mexican magazine Revista América in July 1943, and it would become a central piece in Canto General. In its poignant lines, he suggests that he has been called upon to assume this role, enabled by his poetic ability and progressive ideals. Neruda writes it as his personal introduction to his new calling. It is his credential, as he reports to duty, committed and empowered to lyricize and vocalize the consciousness of the continent.
América, I don’t invoke your name in vain.
When I fix the sword to my heart,
when I withstand the leaks in the soul, when your new day
penetrates me through the windows,
I’m of and I am in the light that produces me,
I live in the shade that determines me,
I sleep and awaken in your essential dawn,
sweet like grapes and terrible,
conductor of sugar and punishment,
saturated in the sperm of your species,
breast-fed on the blood of your heritage.
Neruda made use of his last weeks in Mexico to celebrate with friends and revive old feuds. He threw a parting jab at Octavio Paz: in an interview with the influential Mexican magazine Hoy, he said that “the agronomists and painters are the best part of Mexico,” and that “there is a really impressive absolute lack of direction and moral civility in [Mexico’s] poetry.”
Paz responded publicly:
Señor Pablo Neruda, Chilean consul and poet, is also a known politician, literary critic, and generous patron of certain hangers-on who call themselves “his friends.” These disparate activities cloud his vision and twist his judgment: his literature is contaminated by politics, his politics are contaminated by literature, and his critiques are often just a matter of friendly complicity . . .
The farewell party was to be thrown on August 27. Posters inviting the public were put up all around Mexico City. Ambassador Óscar Schnake wrote back to Santiago that it turned into a major tribute, with more than a thousand people in attendance:
It was exciting, wonderful, difficult, impossible to describe. The celebration took place at the Mexico jai alai arena, because we had to choose the largest venue in Mexico. And even so, a lot of the attendees could not sit down—that was how excited everyone was at that unforgettable tribute . . . Neruda is today the purest, the human embodiment of the poet of America; the man is firm and serene, fully and generously devoted to his ideals.
The French writer Simone Téry, who knew Neruda both in Paris and Mexico, toasted the poet: “Pablo Neruda is such a boy, as down-to-earth, innocent, and mysterious as a little boy. But he is a gigantic, charismatic child, and everyone who spends time with him—soldiers, statesmen, or professors—is compelled to return to their youth.”
César Martino, former president of the Mexican House of Representatives and then head of the Banco de Crédito Agrícola, addressed Neruda:
Since you arrived in Mexico, you have echoed our country’s past, in which it was unjustly exploited. You have echoed our country’s present, struggling forcefully to take charge of its own destiny and stand with the free people, to bring the fires of freedom to the hearts of those who are not yet free, and look toward a better tomorrow, which will belong to everyone in splendor and justice.
On August 30, 1943, nearly two hundred people gathered at Mexico’s Aeropuerto Central to bid Delia and Neruda good-bye.
* * *
It was not to be a hurried return home. Neruda’s tour down the west side of the Americas on the way to Chile was meant “to awaken the sleeping and encourage the wakeful.” He was celebrated as a folk hero, at least for the Left, throughout the continent. One of his stops was Colombia, whose leftist president, Alfonso López Pumarejo, had invited him. During their time in Colombia, Neruda and Delia visited the coffee-growing region of Caldas. There, with the Andes as a backdrop, workers joined children in a ceremony to christen a rural school “Pablo Neruda.”
