Neruda, page 9
As he emerged into prominence within his student circle, Neruda met people who’d be significant to his work, including mentors who took to him immediately. One of them was the prestigious Chilean poet Pedro Prado, a transcendent talent, thirty-three years old when they met. Prado’s support would be instrumental to Neruda in the years to come. A more immediate and direct influence on Neruda’s poetry at the time was the Uruguayan poet Carlos Sabat Ercasty, whom he revered for his intense lyricism and the depth of his connection to both nature and the human condition. Neruda expressed his raw excitement for Sabat to the readers of the December 5, 1923, issue of Claridad, in a review of his recent books:
Carlos Sabat is a great river of expressive energy linked together in athletic succession, dragging it through invading undertows, separating it into diaphanous necklaces of syllables . . . All of this under the pressure of an . . . active conscience skilled in the primary elements of reason and enigma . . . He is victory’s trumpet, the song dividing darkness . . .
With a bravado somewhat reminiscent of how he first knocked on Gabriela Mistral’s door, Neruda wrote to Sabat directly. In his first letter, dated May 13, 1923, from Santiago, he began:
Carlos Sabat. From the first line of yours that I read, you have not had a greater admirer nor more heartfelt sympathy. I’m also a poet, I write and I’ve read about three centuries[’ worth of literature], but nothing of anybody else has carried me so far away. Receive, Sabat, my embrace, through all these tongues that separate us.
The letter concluded with these curiously bold lines: “Send me all your books . . . Write me. How old are you? I’m eighteen . . .” Considering his usual timidity and the fact that he still, at the time of writing this letter, had not published his first book, the familiar tone reveals either courage or mania. Sabat’s intermittent responses to the younger poet, sometimes encouraging, sometimes double edged, would haunt Neruda throughout his career.
Just as important as his literary mentors were the fellow writers who exposed Neruda to new subjects and stylistic approaches. There were enigmatic members of the group like Alberto Rojas Jiménez, four years older than Neruda, one of the main directors of Claridad. Despite his poverty, he gave off the air of a bohemian dandy with “the eccentricity of a storybook prince.” He had a custom of giving away everything to his friends: his hat, his shirt, his jacket, even his shoes. Perhaps most important, he dispelled Neruda’s somber moods by playfully teasing him, though always with tact. His joy was contagious, and in those first years in Santiago, Neruda certainly needed it.
In October 1921, six months after his arrival in the capital, Neruda earned his greatest accolade yet at the FECh’s spring festival. The festival filled the streets of Santiago, especially around the University of Chile’s School of Fine Arts, known as the “School of the Bohemia.” This ability to exercise such a celebration, complete with the election of their queen of the fiesta, was a much-needed validation for the students. They had taken a marginalized, risky path; this was their manifestation after being so often denigrated by the older, more conservative generation.
The fiesta was full of ceremony and revelry. One highlight was the Grand Bacchanalia, a masquerade ball at the federation’s headquarters. Entrance for las señoritas was “absolutely free,” three pesos for the young men. Students got into the bacchanalia fantasy theme by dressing up as demons and angels, Columbuses and Mapuche, Gypsies and Arabs, pirates and Pierrots (after the sad-faced mime pining for love). They promenaded through Santiago, ending up at the dance, where the punch, beer, and wine fueled the sensation of self-expression, sexual passion, and freedom. The students embraced their own identity as the confetti fell like snow, as the alcohol quenched the embers that smoldered in their throats. All of Santiago watched as they rejoiced “in the midst of so much despicable garbage of the world” in which they lived, as Diego Muñoz, a childhood friend of Neruda’s, phrased it.
In the midst of the festivities, Neruda rose above the twenty-five or so other poets involved with the FECh to win the revered poetry competition. The next day, October 15, his “Song of the Fiesta” was published in a beautiful sixteen-page edition by Claridad. It was read aloud in classrooms and bars across Santiago. The poem captured the surging political pulse of the students at the time:
Today as the ripe earth shakes
in a dusty and violent quake
our young souls go forth filled
like the sails of a boat in the wind.
Before the festival, Neruda was little known outside of his artistic, bohemian student circle. With “Song of the Fiesta,” there on the main stage, Neruda was suddenly proclaimed one of the country’s greatest literary talents. “La juventud tenía a su poeta.” This generation had its poet. The prize ceremony was held at the Politeama Theater, two nights after the fiesta, as part of a larger program that included symphonic music and dance. Neruda, though, was simply too shy to read his poem to the huge crowd, and the winner from preceding years had to read it for him.
In the days and weeks that followed, Neruda was asked to read “Song of the Fiesta” all the time, everywhere. The youth were identifying strongly with those verses. But Neruda was not ready to step into the shoes of the celebrity he had become.
Neruda reflected back on it in a poem forty years later:
Song of the fiesta . . . October,
Spring’s
reward:
a full-throated Pierrot unleashes
my poetry above the madness
and I, the fine edge
of a black sword among masks and jasmine
still walking about scowling alone,
cutting through the crowd with the melancholy
of the South wind, beneath the bells
and the unfurling streamers.
—“1921”
Between 1921 and 1926, Claridad published nearly 150 works by Neruda: poems, literary criticism, and political pieces. As it was a student paper, he did not receive payment for his contributions. He got by on a small allowance from his father, who, for now, knew little about his son’s writing.
As a way to differentiate his short essays from his poetry, Neruda published his Claridad literary criticisms under the pseudonym Sachka Yegulev, from the Russian Leonid Andreyev’s novella of the same name, chosen for ideological reasons along with a twinge of romanticism. Sachka leads a bloody rebellion but loses his life in the fight for liberty. The fictional character was a hero to many young Latin Americans. Neruda’s fascination with him would fade, especially as he became more of a pacifist. Other students also assumed Russian pen names as an homage both to that country’s literary heritage and to its revolution.
Neruda’s articles of the early 1920s demonstrate that he was already a highly politicized leftist humanist. On August 27, 1921, Claridad published a gloss by Neruda that epitomizes the activist prose he was producing during these years, this one aimed at the working class, entitled “Employee”:
You don’t know that they exploit you. That they’ve robbed you of happiness, that in return for the dirty money they give you, you gave the portion of beauty that fell over your soul. The cashier who pays your wages is an arm of el patrón [owner-boss]. El patrón is also the arm of a brutal body that keeps killing you just like many other men. But don’t hit the cashier, no, it’s someone else [you should hit], the body, the assassin’s body.
We call it exploitation, capital, abuse. The newspapers that you read, hurried in the streetcar, they call it order, law, patriotism, etc. Perhaps you find yourself weak. No. Here we are, we who now aren’t alone, we who are equal to you and, like you, are exploited and hurt, but we rebel . . .
In a 1922 editorial, he made an early allusion to his sense of a poet’s calling. The text, on the front page of Claridad, runs next to an illustration of what’s evidently a workingman and workingwoman, huddled in the cold, the hardship they’ve endured evident in their postures and facial expressions. The narrator of the piece writes of how he looks at this “miserable and mute” couple, but nothing comes to him; he’s perplexed, wondering, “Why doesn’t the bonfire of my rebellion ignite in my lips? In front of these two beings tied together by the very symbol of my pain, why doesn’t the red word that whips and condemns crack in my heart and mouth?” He keeps looking at the paper, “but nothing!” Until all of a sudden the man in the picture comes to life, grabs the narrator with his hands, looks him in the eyes, and says:
Friend, brother, why do you keep silent? . . . You who know the gift of illuminating the words with your internal flame; you can only sing and sing your small pleasures and forget the abandonment of our hearts, the brutal wound of our lives, the terror of the cold, the scourge of hunger? . . . If you don’t say it and don’t say it in every moment of every hour, you will fill the earth with lying voices that amplify the bad and silence the protest . . .
The man’s discourse continues for a handful of lines until the author, Neruda, writes: “The man stops speaking. His compañera looks at me. And I begin to write . . .”
As for his verse, Neruda was dedicated to completing and publishing his first book, Crepusculario (The Book of Twilights), its title referencing the scarlet fans of the sun’s last rays as seen from his window on Maruri Street. His friends at Claridad offered to publish the book, but under the condition that he come up with the money to print it himself. This was Neruda’s only option at the time. So he sold the few cheap pieces of furniture he had and pawned his black “poet’s suit,” as well as the watch that José del Carmen had solemnly given to him as a gift (how insulted he would have been had he known!). It was only enough to start the printing process, and the inexorable printer wouldn’t hand over any copies until Neruda paid in full.
It was at this critical moment that Hernán Díaz Arrieta entered Neruda’s life. Arrieta, who went by the pen name Alone (using the English word), would become one of Chile’s most influential literary critics. At the time he met Neruda, he was writing for the Santiago newspaper La Nación. Though Alone wasn’t part of the younger crowd, he already knew of Neruda and recognized him by sight one day on one of Santiago’s main avenues, La Alameda.
As Alone wrote in a book nearly fifty years later, Neruda struck him as “pale, with a melancholy air, visibly malnourished, inclined to be silent.” A bit scatterbrained, with “perfunctory manners,” Neruda described his circumstances to Alone: he couldn’t get the printed edition in his hands until he paid the full amount in advance, which he couldn’t afford. The muchacho, the kid, as he appeared to Alone, didn’t ask for anything; he just related the situation.
The timing of the encounter was fortuitous: Alone had just cashed in on some nice capital gains from a stock tip his friend had given him. The money, Alone later admitted, made him feel powerful. With a slight show of grandeur, he generously offered to help fund the printing. Neruda accepted the gift with modesty and gratitude.
Thanks to Alone’s donation, The Book of Twilights was released to the public in June 1923, a month before Neruda turned nineteen. As he wrote in his memoirs, “That moment when the first book appears, with the ink fresh and the paper tender, that enchanted and ecstatic moment, with the sound of beating wings and of the first flower opening on the conquered height, that moment comes only once in the poet’s lifetime.”
The book itself marks a significant moment in Neruda’s advancement in both his self-and social cognition since arriving in Santiago. Neruda’s achievement in The Book of Twilights derives from that growth, from his ability to capture not just the moods of the poet himself, but also the essential characteristics of his generation. It was a generation—not just in Chile—that had been tremendously affected by the monumental global events of the past decade, coming of age during the destruction and inhumanity of World War I, the October Revolution, and the surging movements of socialist anarchism, syndicalist anarchism, and communism around the world.* This series of global changes moved writers and all kinds of artists to develop new styles to express the new realities of mass society: postwar desolation, disillusionment, and sexual disappointment.†
While these world events were churning in the exterior, at home in Santiago the events of the century’s first two decades were quickly changing the city. It was exciting to some, but provoked anxiety among many of Neruda’s generation. As Raymond Craib, an expert on Chile’s student movements at the time, writes:
The dizzying array of technological changes that pumped elite self-confidence also primed consternation. Mass culture could appear threatening, and not “culture” at all. In the new world of the cinemas, social classes mixed. New forms of association between workers and students created feelings of disassociation among others accustomed to more rigid class boundaries. The “death of God” and the crisis in artistic representation had its corollary in the rise of a politics that questioned the very possibility of representation. The continuous influx of migrants from the north, the concomitant growth of the city, and the networks of mobility within it meant that Santiago’s neighborhoods were increasingly traversed by a teeming raif of urban strangers.
Thus The Book of Twilights wasn’t an illustration of a generation caught in the drunken excesses of bohemia, but rather of youths unable to grip all these convulsive changes around them—paralyzed, if you will, in their moment of crisis. Their enthusiasm was equally mixed with despair, and their idealism was inhibited by an apathy, often to the point of inertia.
This sentiment is portrayed in an article Neruda wrote for Claridad several months after The Book of Twilights was published, so emblematic that it was printed on the front page:
We are wretched. We play at living, we pretend to live, every day; every day we expose our skin to the sun, reflections of so much ignominy crawling beneath the sun, tainted by all the lepers on earth, torn to shreds by so much scratching at the filth that surrounds us; throw-away, sterile, useless, filled with unsatisfied anxiety and sacrificed dreams. In that daily piece of existence, peering out to receive malice and give it back, friends, we are whole. With our ruin uselessly patched over by old heroic illusions of other men in other times. With our roots, feverish with mud, mixing the swamp with the junkyard, futilely covered by the awning of the infinite sky. That’s what we are, friends, and less than that. What have we done with our life, friends? Disgust and tears, tears slip out as I ask you, what have you done with your lives?
In Book of Twilights, Neruda joined the vanguard writers of the 1920s in his own way. He wrote skillfully with emotional complexity. To paint this portrait of his generation, he used landscapes of poor barrios and sad fields. Within them he employed succinct phrases to create images that seem to be out of an impressionist painting: dead leaves, aching flesh, a poor tambourine, painful eyes, sad earth, sick bridges, the moss stain among the ruins. Neruda acutely feels his inability to slow the degradation of all these things around him.
And the poems’ speaker—Neruda himself—is constantly fearful, sad, fatigued, poor, distant. We see the purity of the youth’s dreams darkened by the unbearable strains of adolescence. From the poem “I’m Scared”:
(In my troubled mind there’s no room for dreams
like the sky that has no space for a star.)
Not all is lost in the depths, though. The lines above are followed by:
But in my eyes a question exists
and there’s a scream in my mouth that my mouth does not scream.
There are no ears on this earth that hear my sad moan
abandoned in the middle of the infinite earth!
The scream stays paralyzed in the mouth, reflecting the generation’s paralyzed state. But the fact that the scream exists, a question exists, that there exists the potential to articulate and move beyond suggests that an escape is apparent on the horizon—the speaker just hasn’t been able to break through to it yet.
Despite the richness of this portrayal, The Book of Twilights’ public reputation rests mainly on the fact that it was Neruda’s first work, with negligible enduring acclaim for the poetry and little attention to how it captured the zeitgeist of his generation. Even then, most of the critical reception—outside the positive promotions from Claridad and Neruda’s friends—was unenthusiastic. “Overall, the work seems to contain more literature than feeling,” wrote Salvador Reyes, a contemporary of Neruda’s, in Zig-Zag.
Except for its most famous poem, “Farewell,” several of the book’s outstanding poems are hardly known today and have been left out of most anthologies. “Railroad Roundhouses at Night,” his lament to Monge (“into the black night—desperate—the souls / of the dead workers run and sob”), is one example. It resounds above the book’s other sociopolitical poems, because here the sympathy with the proletariat Neruda wants to express originates from a true personal relationship with the subject. That connection enables the poem’s sublimity. It became Neruda’s first poem to be published outside of Chile: in 1923, his old mentor Gabriela Mistral, then in Mexico, included it in an anthology.*
Neruda’s Santiago desolation poem, “Neighborhood with No Electricity,” is also in The Book of Twilights, as well as the one-liner “My Soul.” Like many lines in the book, and the next few to follow, it was a mournful description of how he felt at the time:
My soul is an empty carrousel in the twilight.
The one poem that received real popular notice was “Farewell” (Neruda wrote the title in English). The lines that are still often quoted today are the first poetic reveals of Neruda’s machismo:
I love the love of sailors
who kiss, then leave.
Diego Muñoz wrote that shortly after Book of Twilights’ publication, he and Neruda took a liking to two female performers at their favorite cabaret club, La Ñata Inés. Sarita was the mixed-race daughter of a famous black drummer. As a child, she had performed with her father, and Muñoz vividly remembered seeing her dance when they were both young, in Concepción, before he moved to Temuco and entered Neruda’s grammar school. Annie, the other dancer, had Asian ancestry, unusual in Chile at the time, making the two an exotic combination for Chileans, who were most commonly of European descent.
