The Song Was Not in Vain

I.

You will ask where are the lilacs

And the metaphysics muffled in poppies

I will tell you how things stood with me.

There was a copy of Life magazine a few years ago that contained a spread of Communist world leaders, the people Life felt were trying to destroy Our Way Of Life and replace it with the Soviet Union's. Krushchev was in the spread, as were Tito and Mao. And towards the bottom, in a postage-stamp sized photograph, was another of those horrible totalitarians, Pablo Neruda.

Neruda was a Chilean poet, and it was not he, but evil and arrogant men in the United States, who toyed with freedom and replaced it with terrorism and Nazi-like brutality. Neruda's life and his poetry stood as a crusade against just this sort of criminality.

The Chilean poet was a Communist, a devoted member of the party from 1945 until he died in 1973. The son of a railwayman and a witness to the Spanish Civil War, Neruda writes in his newly-translated Memoirs that he became a Communist because of his inability to accept exploitation as a fact of life. It was through Communism that Neruda though he could reach the peasants, miners and the world's discarded. He writes:

...if I have received many awards, awards fleeting as butterflies, fragile as pollen, I have attained a greater prize, one that some people may deride but not many can attain. I have gone through a difficult apprenticeship and a long search, and also through the labyrinths of the written word, to become the poet of my people. That is my reward...

Neruda was a poet of the people, although most North Americans only learned that when he won his long-overdue Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. By that time Neruda's poetry had become virtual proverb for most Chileans. The poet could attract 5,000 or more working people on a rainy night to hear him recite the verses of "Canto General," his paean to them, or "Spain in Our Hearts." During the Popular Unity government of Salvadore Allende, his verses were painted on thousands of walls throughout Chile. A spokesman for the left, Neruda always wrote for, and to, the people, all people. His poetry, and more recently his Memoirs, are Neruda's attempt to detail his apprenticeship to become the poet of his people.

II.

"When the trumpets had sounded and all was in readiness on the face of the earth..."

Neruda grew up as Neftali Ricard Reyes Basaolto, just after the turn of the century, on Chile's frontier. His first poems were imbued with the wilderness, the beauty he saw more than the harshness that was a way of life. A father unsympathetic to his creative urges led Neruda to change his name. He unknowingly adopted that of a famous Czechoslovakian poet, Jan Neruda.

In 1929 he moved to Santiago to attend the Teachers Institute and begin a career as a French professor. The academic career never flourished, but his poetry did. He and fellow poets in Santiago lived the lifestyle traditionally associated with their profession: dressed in black, they often went hungry and struggled to get their work published. It was at this time that Neruda wrote and was able to publish Twenty Poems of Love and an Ode on Desperation, a melancholy collection filled with torment and passion. Neruda would later refer to the poems as the expression of his love affair with Santiago.

Like many South American artists and writers, Neruda followed a course throughout his life that included diplomatic duty--first in Ceylon, Burma and other parts of then-very distant Asia, and then in Spain during the days of the Republic. It was in that latter time that he encountered the people--the young, political poets of Spain--and the passions of the Spanish Civil War. Both were poetic milestones that marked a profound change in his writing.

Neruda was the Chilean consul in Spain when he met Federico Garcia Lorca, a poet who, Neruda writes in the Memoirs, was "the most loved, the most cherished of all Spanish poets, and he was the closest to being a child because of his marvelous happy temperament."

Garcia Lorca was assassinated for his Republican sympathies less than two years after they met, an event which symbolized the beginning of the civil war to Neruda. The poet immediately threw his support to the Republic and as a result was recalled from Spain--non-intervention was the policy of the day--but the civil war had been burned into his consciousness.

The third volume of Neruda's Residence on Earth, so different in tone from the first two, pays homage to that destruction and marks the distinctive change in the tenor of his poetry. He writes in his Memoirs of his change from naturalistic verse to political:

I had thought hard about all the world, but not about man. Cruelly and painfully, I had probed man's heart; without a thought for mankind, I had seen cities, but empty cities; I had seen factories whose very presence was a tragedy, but I had not really seen the suffering under those roofs, on the streets, at every way station, in the cities and the countryside.

As the first bullets ripped into the guitars of Spain, when blood instead of music gushed out of them, my poetry stopped dead like a ghost in the streets of human anguish...

Poem after poem the third volume of Residence on Earth and of "Spain in Our Hearts," a work filled with indignation and pathos that he began a month after Garcia Lorca's death, reiterates that theme.

III.

"Jehovah divided his universe: Anaconda, Ford Motors, Coca-Cola Inc.,..."

Nineteen forty-five was an important year for Neruda: he joined the Communist Party, was elected a Senator from Tarapaca and Antofagasta, two Chilean provinces populated by workers in the copper and nitrate mines, and wrote perhaps his most famous collection of poems, The Heights of Macchu Picchu. His decision to become a Communist caused him continual harassment; newspapers often would ignore his letters and censor his statements. He was briefly imprisoned in Argentina with no explanation given. Anti-Communist priests persecuted his poor friends and, finally, the Chilean courts ordered his arrest for criticizing the government, forcing him into exile for three years.

His flight from Chile, through the harsh Southern Andes into Argentina and eventually over to Paris, left an impression on him perhaps as great as the events of a decade before. It was this journey, among mountain peasants who had never heard the name or the poetry of Pablo Neruda, that he recounts in his Nobel Lecture and repeats in the Memoirs. The trip across the Andes contained a simple lesson for Neruda: the poet must identify with mankind because "there is no such thing as a lone struggle."

Most of Neruda's time until his return to Chile in 1952 was spent writing, living in Europe and traveling in Asia and the Soviet Union, which he loved oblivious to the imminence of what he would later call "Stalin's dark night." The revelations of the Twentieth Congress came as a grave shock to Neruda, one which the Memoirs show he could only hesitatingly accept. He refutes accusations in the Memoirs that he remained a die-hard Stalinist, even after the Congress, yet he writes that he can never forget that Stalin had appeared to the world as the "titanic defender" of the Russian Revolution, the leader of the Red Army that "attacked and demolished the power of Hitler's demons." He wrote only one poem to Stalin, recognizing the evil and the hope he represented, at the time of the Russian leader's death. It is rarely included in anthologies.

Neruda's life through the 1950s and '60s was much less eventful than his first 40 years. He divorced his wife of 18 years, Delia del Carril, and moved in with Mathilde Urrutia, about whom he wrote The Captain's Verses. That work went unsigned for many years not, as some critics said, because the CP disapproved but because, Neruda explains in the Memoirs, the passionate love for Urrutia he splashed throughout The Captain's Verses would have caused his wife unnecessary and harsh anguish.

His time was also spent collecting sea shells--15,000 of them--and rare books. When the books and shells overflowed his house, Neruda packed them up and delivered them to Chile's National University in Santiago. Anti-communist thundering against the acceptance of the gift consigned them to oblivion; 20 years after he had donated the collection, Neruda related that they never had appeared before the public, perhaps having been returned to the sea and the used bookstores of the world.

Neruda re-entered the political arena in 1969 to run on the C.P. ticket for president of Chile. He withdrew his nomination in favor of the Popular Unity Party candidate, his friend Salvador Allende. Allende's victory began Chile's revolution that would end so tragically three years later with the help of the Kissingers and Nixons. But while it lasted it represented to Neruda hope, decency and humanity:

Here in Chile, in the middle of enormous difficulties, a truly just society was being erected, based on our sovereignty, our national pride, and the heroism of the best of Chile's population. On our side, on the side of the Chilean revolution, were the constitution and the law, democracy and hope.

But there were challengers to this vision:

They had everything they wanted on their side. They had harlequins and jumping jacks, lots of clowns, terrorists with pistols and chains, phony monks and degraded members of the armed services. They all rode the merry-go-round of petty spite.

Neruda would just live to see the generals and fascists have their way. He wrote the last entry in the Memoirs three days after Allende's assassination: "...the tanks went into action, many tanks, fighting heroically against a single man: the President of the Republic of Chile, Salvadore Allende, who was waiting for them in his office, with no other company but his great heart, surrounded by smoke and flames." Five days later the poet for whom Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize in 1964 died heartbroken, having witnessed in his own country the same tragedy he had seen 35 years before in Spain.

III.

"The most succulent item of all, the United Fruit Company Incorporated reserved for itself: the heartland and coasts of my country..."

Neruda's Memoirs are both moving and somehow unfulfilling. They are filled with philosophy and hope, much as is his poetry; and entangle the reader into an emotionally exhausting extent in the triumphs and tragedies of history. But the function of memoirs is to make a person more accessible, Neruda's don't bring us much closer to the poet than his verses already did. In a sense, the Memoirs are the prose form of his poetry--both are filled with nature, indignation and politics. And to a reader of Neruda's poetry, his Memoirs will contain little that is new.

The Memoirs do give us wonderful sketches of Neruda's friends and contemporaries--Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Eduardo Frei, Soong Ch'ing Ling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen, and Cesar Vallejo among others--but they somehow leave us without the personal detail of Neruda himself. The Memoirs, for instance, barely mention Neruda's first wife or marriage, an 18-year venture--and have no more than one or two dozen specific time references.

Neruda prefers to stick to the philosophical rather than the mundane and perhaps it is the voyeur in us that is left feeling unfulfilled. We learn about Neruda, the poet-philosopher, but little about Neruda, the fallible man, demystified and much like us. The impression left from the Memoirs is of a man almost too selfless, too moral, too forgiving. His only flaw seems to be a culturally-determined sexism.

But this perfection is, of course, a function of memoirs--to determine the way in which one will be viewed by history. The disagreements with popular sentiment, the quarrels with historical revelations, as in the case with Neruda's impressions about Stalin, can be glossed over.

If Neruda doesn't grant us picky details, he makes up for it in inspiration. In a style that is as lucid, simple and accessible even in translation as any of his poems, the Memoirs unfold a philosophy full of warmth and hope, nationalism and internationalism. All this, despite having witnessed and written about some of the saddest, most discouraging episodes in recent history. Although his Memoirs end, as did his life, with the recognition of yet another tragedy, Neruda, who found hope in the past, would have realized that American dollars and cruel, powerhungry generals can not permanently retard progress toward a more just world. He always saw the glimmer of a final victory and allowed the world to see it as well when it acknowledged his work and his struggle in the 1971 Stockholm ceremonies. In his speech to the world he said:

I wish to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets, that the whole future has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice, and dignity to all mankind.

In this way the song will not have been sung in vain.