Neruda, page 41
Flowers lined the walk at La Michoacán from the street to the halls within, while two policemen stood outside, writing down the license plate numbers of all the guests. The crackdown on the Communists may have softened, but with the Cold War still going strong in South America, the party stayed outlawed until 1958, and the government kept tabs on its former members and other leftists.
Once in the house, Neruda gave an interview to the magazine Ercilla, declaring that for the upcoming elections,
I will offer my support to Allende as the people’s candidate . . . As for my future activities, I cannot add anything more at this time. Those decisions are not mine to make; they are for my party. I am a disciplined Communist militant.
I want to make something clear about the rumors going around that conditions were placed upon my arrival. There have been no such conditions, and I would not have accepted any. My arrival is the result of a triumphant struggle that began the moment I left. I have no grudges or hatred against anyone.
He then tried to dispel any notions that his life in exile had been full of bourgeois indulgences, that he had become too international. He claimed that he was just a typical Chilean, “the opposite of cosmopolitan. Before, people in my generation liked living in Paris. I like living in my land, with everything it produces. Chilean peaches and oysters are beyond comparison.” There was sincerity in those words. Neruda could live anywhere in the world, but other than frequent short trips and his brief time as ambassador to France in the early 1970s, from this point on he would always live in his beloved Chile. The Uruguayan writer Emir Rodríguez Monegal named Neruda the “Immobile Traveler,” with one foot always in his home country.
When he donated a vast portion of his library and seashell collection to the University of Chile just before his fiftieth birthday, Neruda posited, “The poet isn’t a lost stone. He has two sacred obligations: to leave and to return.” He added that especially in countries like Chile, geographically “isolated in the wrinkles of the planet,” where the origins of everyone from the humblest to the most distinguished are known, “we have the fortune to be able to create our nation, to all be something like parents to it.”
The welcome party for his return from exile moved on to Plaza Bulnes, where three or four thousand people were waiting for the returning hero. There was a band dressed in yellow satin. When the poet arrived, the crowd started chanting, “¡Neruda! ¡Neruda!” Tomás Lago said that Neruda wept. When the speeches were done, the multitude marched in a parade down La Alameda, Santiago’s great boulevard, to Salvador Allende’s presidential campaign headquarters. The Allende command had in fact been eagerly awaiting Neruda’s return, hoping his celebrity and energy would invigorate its campaign, which had failed to gain much traction. But Neruda’s support gained little, especially with the Communist Party still illegal, the Socialists suffering from internal divisions, and Allende’s group lacking the resources to mount a sufficient national campaign. Allende received just 5 percent of the vote. Carlos Ibáñez, a former dictator who had run as an independent populist promising to clean up Chile, became the new president. It was Chile’s first presidential election in which women could vote.
Neruda settled back into La Michoacán with Delia, where he would spend less time with her and more at his writing desk. The desk was made of blond wood and surrounded by stacks of books and photographs of Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Charles Baudelaire. He usually started around nine in the morning, after breakfast. He had a regimen, setting out to write one, two, sometimes three poems each day. Neruda said he had neither the time nor desire to reread his poems over and over. He always wrote in green ink, though he never specifically explained why. Many attribute Neruda’s use of green to it being a symbol of hope. He rarely used a typewriter after a hand injury he had incurred. In a 1971 interview with the Paris Review, he explained:
Ever since I had an accident in which I broke a finger and couldn’t use the typewriter for a few months, I have followed the custom of my youth and gone back to writing by hand. I discovered when my finger was better and I could type again that my poetry when written by hand was more sensitive; its plastic forms could change more easily. In an interview, Robert Graves says that in order to think one should have as little as possible around that is not handmade. He could have added that poetry ought to be written by hand. The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.
Delia, then Matilde, or his secretaries Homero Arce and the tireless Margarita Aguirre, would type his handwritten papers. Delia often made corrections and suggestions, which he’d often take to heart and include.
Almost all of La Michoacán was made from organic materials, like the coarse, rustic wood of Neruda and Delia’s long outdoor table, which held vegetables from tender fava beans and spring onions with long green stalks to the ripest tomatoes from just outside Santiago. It might be covered with a sheet, never a more formal tablecloth. It was a stage that Neruda would set, arranging everything spontaneously. Potbellied jugs of peaches in Chilean white wine or strawberries in red wine were placed along the table, with green fluted glass goblets placed beside them.
As Aida Figueroa put it in a 2003 interview, “He was the stage designer of life. He didn’t live overambitiously, but rather he lived a life filled with surprise, excitement, and exploration.” Upon Neruda and Delia’s return, Aida and her husband, Sergio Insunza, became close friends with the two older Communists they had hidden in their apartment before Neruda fled into exile. They came over almost every Saturday for lunch. Aida asserted that she couldn’t think of a more delightful time than the hours they spent at La Michoacán between 1952 and 1955, the “years they were together before Delia knew about Matilde.”
Inés Valenzuela commented on how often people came over and that Neruda “was very tender with Delia. Pablo was attached to Delia, not the other way around; she was affectionate but tranquilla.”
Neruda the Captain was home triumphant, with wife and lover, party and friends, flourishing, beaming, fulfilled. The sickly boy from Temuco and the depressed consul in the Far East were long gone.
To visitors, life at La Michoacán was a celebration of harmony and friendship, of sharing and singing. Sometimes they put on a simple show in the garden’s amphitheater, dedicated to Lorca. Neruda usually spoke little, but he was the great director of everything going on. “He made everything magical,” Aida said. “And la Hormiga complemented him. That house never had a closed door. There never was a key, not to the door to the street, not to the fence, not to Pablo’s room, not anywhere. It was an open house. La Hormiga kept it that way.”
Neruda’s poetry seemed to draw on the same sunny comforts. The poem “The Invisible Man,” written in Italy just before he returned, can be seen as yet another literary manifesto. It is almost diametrically opposed to the surrealistic “Arte poética” he had written during his time in the Far East, the one he continued to shun for its abstraction and negativity in light of the battle the people were waging for justice, peace, and progress. The poem is much lighter, less dense, and while long, it signals the form of his coming odes; most of the 244 lines are short and simple, just three or four words long:
I’m not superior
to my brother,
but I smile,
because when I walk through the streets
and only I do not exist,
life runs
like all the rivers,
I am the only
invisible one,
there aren’t mysterious shadows,
no mist,
the whole world speaks to me,
everyone wants to tell me things,
they talk to me about their relatives,
their miseries
and their joy . . .
Neruda had laid out this new perspective and voice in an interview with Lenka Franulic the day he returned from exile.* She asked if it was true that in Mexico, he publicly renounced Twenty Love Poems and Residence. Not exactly, he answered. “I’ve said that my first poetry is pessimistic, gloomy, and painful, that it expresses the anguish of my youth. That anguish wasn’t produced by me, but rather by society itself, by the decomposition of life in the capitalist system. I don’t want that poetry to influence the youth now. We must fight and struggle.”
He went on to make some of his clearest statements on realism. Because of the struggle, because of the fight, because he had “tremendous faith in Chile,” because the fight must continue, he told Franulic, “I write in a different form now.” His personal approach was about to become a more dynamic, subtle, natural realism, still anchored in the social, still eschewing anything complex or unclear. “When one sends people into combat, they cannot sing funeral songs. From this comes what’s called new realism,” he explained. “The return to realism has a double bottom: the aesthetic needs of humans and the political background. My ambition is to write like one whistles while walking down the street. I think this should be the language of absolutely straightforward, untrembling poetry.”
“The Invisible Man” is his first attempt to realize this ambition. It is neither a political diatribe nor a love poem, but in it Neruda has gone from introvert to extrovert, with a language accessible to all, stripped down to the bare realities. Neruda the man, the monumental man and poet, must make himself invisible, an everyman indistinguishable in the crowd, equal to his fellow workers.
He communicates through the clarity of the language, straightforward and clean, without airs; he becomes transparent. From now on, his poetry will be transparent like never before. “There are no mysterious shadows, / there is no darkness,” Neruda writes in the poem. He is still serving as a poet, but one who has come down off the pedestal to stand with the masses, with the men and women in the street. When he says, “Everyone wants to tell me things,” he’s showing his accessibility. They talk to him about their relatives, just as they’d talk to their friend or neighbor, and he amplifies their voices. By using the first person, the voice is grounded in a being—he is present; he is invested in it. The poem is tangible; it is not art for art’s sake.
“The Invisible Man” is very reminiscent of “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.” There he expressed the Incan workers’ plight, their silenced language, to raise consciousness with the hope of stimulating social change. At the end of “The Invisible Man,” he asks his fellow Chileans to share their concerns, their stories of suffering, in order to transmit the story of their plight as well.
“The people give me my poetry and I give my poetry to the people,” Neruda proclaimed at a party fund-raiser the year the poem came out. It was a pretentious assumption, in the same vein as presuming to be the spokesperson for the ancient workers. Still, he had the perception and the motivation to create unique poetry that interpreted the social realities of “the people” in a radically different way, allowing their stories to transcend the oppressive ideologies of the upper, ruling classes. It was that reciprocity that defined his life at this stage, the role he had assumed on and off the written page, answering his calling as if it were an obligation. The poet’s calling: an obligation, yet also a natural impulse; simultaneously being called while calling to others.
give me
the everyday
struggles
because they are my song,
and that way we will walk together,
shoulder to shoulder,
all of humanity,
my song unites them:
the song of the invisible man
who sings with humanity.
“The Invisible Man” would be the first poem, a kind of preface, for the first of four books of odes Neruda published between 1952 and 1959—a total of 216 odes.* In 1953, Neruda said, “On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.” Neruda’s new odes reached an extremely vast range of readers. The odes were oriented toward social themes; their style was still realist, the style in which he had been writing over the past decades. Yet perhaps more than almost all the other poems written after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, his approach in the odes was experimental, full of the innovation and creative spontaneity with which he began his career.
Neruda’s close friend Miguel Otero Silva, editor in chief of El Nacional in Caracas, who had published Neruda’s denouncement of González Videla, asked him to contribute a weekly column of poetry. Neruda agreed but asked that the poems be printed in the main news pages rather than the arts supplement. Although only a handful of his odes appeared in the paper, through the practice he found the form for his odes.
The small columns of the newspaper obliged Neruda to make shorter lines, and the opportunity to reach all the readers of the newspaper—not just those who read the culture pages—led Neruda to make the poems seem simpler, though not simplistic, using everyday language for everyday people about everyday things. This simple, elementary form reflected the odes’ relationship to the elementary objects he wanted to describe. The poems Neruda wrote for the newspaper were the drawing board for hundreds more, which would, through those four books of his, elevate the quotidian in a political act of subverting social hierarchy.
Often the ordinary subject matter—onions, tomatoes, conger eel chowder, even socks—and their free, almost prosaic voice made the odes seem less “poetic,” more plainspoken. But Neruda’s thoughtful, conceptual associations gave the poems a compelling, often surprising punch, so that they captured the reader’s attention. Through his technique, he was able to make these everyday subjects seem sublime. As Jaime Concha, professor emeritus of Latin American literature at the University of California, San Diego, puts it: by focusing on the “fragile singularities” of these objects, individually and minute within the midst of all the universal laws of the material world, Neruda makes “the great energies of totality pulse within these minuscule grains, both symbolic and edible.” One of the remarkable qualities of the odes is that he achieves all of that through complex, challenging, groundbreaking poetic work behind the scenes of the lines; he is able to place the object within a matrix of social relations and then spin a transformational poem around it without disturbing the poem’s simple, elemental appearance and accessibility.
Neruda wrote odes to everything, from a chestnut fallen on the ground to poverty, from Walt Whitman to an anonymous bricklayer. Perhaps Neruda wrote too many odes, for at a certain point their efficient beauty isn’t sustained. Still, this new form was among his greatest literary achievements, in particular the first two volumes. The odes are a major reason Neruda is considered to be one of the most exuberant poets of all time.
The odes are organized alphabetically, as if he set out to write an ambitious, innovative encyclopedia in line with the famous eighteenth-century French Encyclopédie, whose descriptions reflected the ideals of the Enlightenment thinkers who contributed to it, including Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, with Denis Diderot as chief editor. Inspired by the thirty-nine-volume set of the Encyclopédie he had purchased while in exile in France, Neruda intended to describe and record everyday elements and objects that have a social function, that relate and are useful to the daily experience of humankind. He hoped to expand upon the records of the Enlightenment thinkers by adding in a higher, more developed dose of class consciousness and by elevating the ode form to deliver the essentials of each subject to the reader in a dynamic and memorable way.
In his careful, meditative examination of each subject, Neruda sometimes demonstrated social disparities. In virtually every poem he expressed a natural optimism that came from describing the reality of everyday objects, sometimes by animating them and presenting them as living beings. In a few cases the subjects were living beings, such as César Vallejo or Paul Robeson, but sometimes they were intangible, as in “Ode to Happiness,” or inanimate, like in “Ode to the Chair”:
War is vast like the shadowed jungle
Peace
begins
in a single
chair.
The odes received favorable reviews, including high praise from Alone. While his conservatism never became a major factor in his literary criticism of Neruda, Alone found it hard to accept both the prosody and political bent in some of the work he wrote toward the end of his exile, heavy on social realism and Stalinist overtones, Las uvas y el viento in particular. This made his review of the first book of odes in the conservative newspaper El Mercurio more remarkable:
Some say this clarity of expression was imposed by the Soviets so that Neruda would be able to reach the masses. If that were true, we would have to forgive the Soviets for an awful lot . . . never has the poetry of Neruda seemed more authentic . . .
We would like to place a limit on this praise. It is said that no judgment is good without its reservations. But we can find none. We even forgive the poet his communism.
Alone was really impressed by the book’s optimism, writing, “Neruda has never smiled as he does now.” The new joy led to a new clarity in his poems, Alone believed, directly reaffirming Neruda’s goals. Besides their lyrical value, many of the odes work as a political tool, using compelling verse to convey the social utility of everyday, natural objects. Because of the familiarity and accessibility of these objects, we often lose sight of their value. Neruda’s goal was to help the reader to recognize their implicit virtue. “Ode to the Onion,” for instance, celebrates an ordinary vegetable through elevated praise:
the earth
[made] you,
onion,
clear as a planet,
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
