by Pablo Neruda
In those miserable environs, literature revealed thuggish figures and picaresque feats of survival, casting them, however, in a strange light. A great nihilism, a false Nietzschean cynicism, permitted many in our ranks to cover themselves with the masks of delinquents. Many turned their lives toward destruction or crime.
My precocious antagonist sprang from that background. First he tried to seduce me, to get me snarled up in the rules of his game. This went against the grain of my country-boy, petit bourgeois upbringing. I didn’t have the nerve for it, and I didn’t like being an opportunist. The man in question, older than I, was an expert at taking advantage of any situation. He lived in a world of continuous farce, where he cheated himself by playing the bully’s role, as profession and protection.
It’s time to identify this character. His name was Joe Blow. He was a strong, hairy man who tried to impress people with both his rhetoric and his physique.
One time, when I was only eighteen or nineteen years old, he proposed that he and I bring out a literary review. The review would be made up of just two sections: one where he would declare, in various tones, in prose pieces and poems, that I was a powerful and brilliant poet; and another where I would proclaim to the four winds that he possessed absolute intelligence and unlimited talent. Everything would be perfect this way.
I was very young, but I felt that this would be stretching things too far.
Yet I had a hard time dissuading him from it. He was amazing at publishing reviews, and it was incredible to watch the way he scraped up funds to keep up his eternal pamphleteering.
For his books and journals as well as for his domestic needs, Joe Blow was a systematic blackmailer. He traced out a precise line of action in the isolated, wintry provinces. The long-suffering practitioners of the liberal professions live isolated from the nation’s culture, which is transformed into privilege and a mythology of the metropolis. He had already made up a long list of doctors, lawyers, dentists, agronomists, professors, engineers, top men in public office, etc. Enveloped in the aureole of his voluminous publications, reviews, complete works, epic and lyric pamphlets, our personage would arrive on the scene as the bearer of universal culture. He would solemnly offer all this to the obscure men he visited, and then he deigned to charge them a few miserable escudos. Confronted by his high-flown words, the victim gradually shrank down to the size of a fly. Blow generally departed with the escudos in his pocket and left the fly behind, completely snowed under by the greatness of universal culture.
* * *
At other times, he would brandish a picture recently executed by someone or other from his family, and though the paint was still wet, he would attribute it to some past master, from the home country or abroad.
Occasionally, when the deal was done, he would tell me on his way out: “I took that hayseed for fifty pesos. You want ten?”
Timid, and inwardly horrified, I would refuse.
When I was spending my vacations at my parents’ home sometime around 1925, Joe Blow came to visit me. He brought with him a scheme for bilking the southern landowners out of their money. This time he was in the company of Rubén Azócar, novelist, poet, and companion from my youth, with immense eyebrows, a face like an Indian mask, a feeble constitution, and a heart that wouldn’t quit. Joe Blow had talked him into coming along.
It was quite a show: the lunatic Joe Blow in riding breeches and policeman’s boots, wrapped in a magnificent, exotic houppelande; and with him my scrawny comrade defending himself from the evening chill with a checked tweed jacket that was his one worthy possession in this world.
Joe Blow introduced himself as an expert in agrarian advertising and offered to prepare for the backcountry farmers of the south de luxe monographs on their estates, complete with photos of the owners and the cattle.
He would come and go on the ranches, dragging along my poor friend. Mingling flattery and veiled threats of unfavorable publicity, our man left the farm country with a fair number of checks. The landowners were stingy, but realistic, and would hand him a few bills to get rid of him.
Notable among the peculiarities of Joe Blow, Nietzschean philosopher and compulsive writer, was his intellectual and physical hooliganism. He was a professional bully in Chile’s literary life. Throughout history, the bully has always relied on a small coterie of cowards to lavish praise on him, and so it was for our hero for a number of years. But life has a habit of taking the wind mercilessly out of the sails of these opportunists.
I remember, during the very same visit of that impostor to the country, something humiliating, a kind of debacle, occurred in my presence. Blow was treating Rubén Azócar and me to a few bottles of wine with the earnings from those agrarian monographs the farmers would never see. On the third bottle, he started playing his Fierabras role to the hilt. He shouted insults to enemies both imagined and real, not even sparing Azócar or me the brunt of his epithets. His cursing was unimaginative, with interminable scatological allusions. When I tried to retire from the table, he stood up to block me. He assured me the two of us were pillars of the intellectual life of the planet, and that he had nonetheless observed a certain reticence on my part with regard to his genius. Then he cried hot tears.
When he tried to embrace me, he collapsed over an assortment of glasses and bottles, and the barman, who was the owner of the place, approached. Unlike Rubén and me, who were a couple of underfed youngsters, the proprietor was a beaming, robust creature who extracted Joe Blow from beneath the table with ease. After standing him up, he made us a proposition: “It seems that the gentleman has overdone it with the drinking. It’s cold out tonight, there’s mud in the streets, and he could easily have an accident. I don’t have rooms to rent, but I can offer him a bed to relax in and sleep it off, no fee required.” All the while, he kept hold of our lunatic so he wouldn’t plunge to the floor again. Joe Blow heard his offer and had the bad idea to respond: “If you offer me a bed with a woman in it, I’ll take it.”
Turning to us, the brawny barkeep remarked: “The gentleman is confused about me. I’m not a scoundrel, indeed, I consider myself a gentleman. And for that reason, I shall teach him a lesson.”
* * *
Then, taking our Fierabras by the lapel, he dealt him a stupefying slap across the mouth. He spun him around as if he were a shop-window mannequin, marched him toward the door, and gave him a strategic last kick in the behind. Our titan tumbled out into the rain-swept night and lay there stretched out in the muck.
The little hotel where Blow and Rubén were staying was next to my house, and we walked there in the blackness of night, while our battered buffoon, who had yet to fully absorb the blows from the barkeep, stumbled along, vociferating against us.
We managed to calm his fury and I took my leave of Blow and my wretched friend, his sidekick, at the door to the hotel.
The next day, my father, Reyes the conductor, who always boasted of his punctuality, looked at me severely as he sat down at the table for lunch, and said: “Twelve-thirty, and your friends still haven’t arrived.”
I rushed out to look for Joe Blow and Rubén Azócar. Unpleasant as the previous night may have been, I was still too young to cut my ties with that abusive visitor.
When I entered his room, an unusual situation presented itself. The poet Rubén Azócar was alone in his shirtsleeves, seated on the bed. My comrade was ever the emotional type, given to outbursts of joy and depths of depression. Now, with his head in his hands, he looked like an ancient Aztec statue of desolation.
“What is it?” I asked. “I was waiting for you at lunch. My father has already sat down at the table.”
“He’s gone,” he responded without looking up.
“Joe Blow?” I said. “All the better. Finally he’ll give you some peace. Let’s go eat.”
“I can’t,” he answered.
“Why can’t you?”
“He took my jacket,” he said, almost in tears.
I took him away, almost shoving him. At
my house, I draped my poet’s cape over his shoulders, and that way he managed to have lunch, in at least superficially dignified garments, at the table of my father, who was a stickler for formalities.
I decided then to free myself from this burdensome friendship. But things aren’t so simple.
This dreadful individual hounded me with his admiration, which he wished to see repaid through reciprocal literary esteem. His literary output struck me as a never-ending song and dance, a messianic falsification of the poet, replete with grandiloquent rhetorical repetitions. Then again, I was on a different path, vertically different, the path of my book Venture of the Infinite Man.
I began to receive ebullient love letters, very literary despite their numerous spelling errors. I delighted in the “embrases” sent along to me, spelled thus, with an s, and they struck me, I don’t know why, as superior to normal embraces with their c’s. Those “embrases” were redolent of oysters, or so it seemed.
So it seemed, anyway, until Fierabras himself showed up one day, apprised of my new address. This time, eyeing me up cruelly, as if I had committed some enormity, he addressed me like an inquisitor.
“You received certain love letters, don’t try to deny it.”
“Yes, a few, now and again,” I answered with adolescent vanity.
“I am referring to a woman, quite a looker, who’s written to you. Here is her portrait.”
I looked at the photo of a far from extraordinary girl. It was hard to imagine her as the author of those misspelled embraces.
“Yes,” I said. “So?”
“I would like you to marry her,” he replied.
There was something pleading in his tone of voice. Also a kind of providential air, as though he were inducting me into the Most Noble Order of the Garter. But then, there was a threat as well: I was to become part of his family, his clan, which was in general as aggressive as he.
I decided to change addresses again. And this time he didn’t find me so easily, as I’d gone to live in India.
* * *
The sensationalist politico-literary harassment unleashed against me and my work by a shady Uruguayan with a Galician last name, something like Ribeyro, has been just as insane and grim. For several years now, this fellow has been publishing pamphlets, in Spanish and French, in which he takes me apart. The fantastic thing about this is that not only do his anti-Neruda doings overcrowd printing paper that he himself pays for, but also he has spent money on expensive trips, with my destruction always in mind.
This strange character traveled to Oxford University when it was announced that I would be made doctor honoris causa. The Uruguayan versifier arrived with his fantastic charges, all set to tear my literary reputation to shreds. I was still wearing my scarlet gown, after receiving the honorary distinction, when the Oxford dons gleefully told me, over the ritual glass of port, about his charges against me.
Even more unbelievable and daring was this same Uruguayan’s trip to Stockholm in 1963. There was a rumor that I would receive the Nobel Prize. Well, the fellow visited members of the Academy, gave interviews to the press, spoke over the radio to make the flat statement that I was one of Trotsky’s killers, hoping to have me disqualified from the prize with these threats.
Time proved that the man always ran into bad luck, and both in Oxford and in Stockholm he lamentably lost his money and the fight.
IF THEY STRIKE IT, LET IT SING
In recent days, attacks on my ideas and my poetry have multiplied. Within and outside of Chile, more than one professional Anti-Nerudist has appeared. As concerns my poetry, no debate is possible. Not because my poetry is greater or loftier or clearer or better or worse than any other. No, not because of that. My poetry has to defend itself on its own. It came from the damp woodlands of Temuco to sing like the rain on the roofs in Cautín. Let it defend itself with its song alone. If they beat it with a club, let it sing. If they spit in its eyes, let it sing. If they drag it through the filthy street by its hair, let it sing, and let the neighbors come out on their balconies to hear the voice of my song of rain and struggle, of people and plants, of salads and onions, of rage and love. I will never be seen taking to the streets or the broadsheets to defend my poetry. I will spare neither adjectives nor blows for whoever thinks me a bad, a dreadful, an unbearable poet. We cannot fight for what we are, but only for what we believe. No one can fight morally for his nose or his feet, his teeth or hair. The born poet cannot fight for his poetry. The carpenter doesn’t fight for his trusses, doesn’t write to the papers to proclaim the supremacy of his crossbeams or the grandiose style of the chair he’s woven out of bulrush.
It’s not from modesty that I avoid polemics about my poetry. It is because I am a poet.
But the carpenter and the poet, every common man—and all of us are common men and women—has the duty to fight for what he believes in.
And that is a battle I accepted long ago.
CRITICISM AND SELF-CRITICISM
There is no denying that I have had some good critics. I am not referring to well-wishers at literary banquets, and I am not talking of the insults I unwillingly provoked.
I am referring to other people. Of the books written about my poetry, apart from those by enthusiastic young critics, I must name the one by Lev Ospovat, the Russian, as among the best. This young man went so far as to master Spanish, and saw my poetry with an eye on more than just sense and sound: he placed it in the perspective of the future, applying to it the northern lights of his world.
Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a critic of the first rank, published a book on my poetry and titled it El viajero inmóvil (The Motionless Traveler). You can see at a glance that this scholar is nobody’s fool. He perceived at once that I like to travel without stepping out of my house or leaving my country or even going out of myself. (In a copy I have of that marvelous mystery novel The Moonstone, there is an illustration I like very much. It shows an elderly English gentleman wrapped in his houppelande, or macfarlane or heavy frock coat or whatever it is, sitting in front of the fireplace, a book in one hand, his pipe in the other, and two drowsy dogs at his feet. That’s how I would like to remain forever, before the fire, near the sea, with two dogs, reading the books it was such hard work to collect, smoking my pipes.)
Amado Alonso’s book Poesía y estilo de Pablo Neruda (Poetry and Style of Pablo Neruda), is highly valued by many people. His passionate probing into the shadows, seeking diverse levels between words and slippery reality, is of great interest. Furthermore, Alonso’s study reveals the first serious concern for the work of a contemporary poet in our language. And that honors me far too much.
* * *
To study and explain my poetry, many critics have come to me, among them Amado Alonso himself; he would corner me with questions and lead me to the wall of clarity, where I often could not follow him, at that time.
Some believe I am a surrealist poet, for others I am a realist, and still others do not believe I am a poet. They are all partly correct and partly incorrect.
Residencia en la tierra was written, or at least begun, like Tentativa del hombre infinito, before the heyday of surrealism, but we can’t always trust dates. The world’s air transports poetry’s molecules, light as pollen or hard as lead, and those seeds land in the furrows, or on people’s heads, giving everything an air of spring or of battle, producing flowers as well as missiles.
As for realism, I must say, in my own interest, that I detest realism in poetry. Moreover, poetry does not have to be surrealist or sub-realist, though it may be anti-realist. And it is anti-realist with all reason, with all unreason; that is, with all poetry.
I love books, the solid substance of the work of poetry, the forest of literature, I love all of it, even the spines of books, but not the labels of the schools. I want books without schools and without classifying, like life.
I like the “positive hero” in Walt Whitman and Mayakovsky, that is, in those who found him without a formula and brought him, not without su
ffering, into the intimacy of our physical life, making him share with us our bread and our dream.
Socialist society has to put an end to the mythology of an age of speed, in which poster ads are more valued than the merchandise, in which the essentials are tossed aside. But a writer’s deepest need is to write good books. I like the “positive hero,” but there is also room in my heart for Lautréamont’s mourning-clad hero, Laforgue’s sighing knight errant, and Baudelaire’s negative soldier. Beware of separating these halves of the apple of creation, for we may cut open our hearts and stop living. Beware! We have to demand of the poet that he take his place in the street and in the fight, as well as in the light and in the darkness.
Perhaps the poet has always had the same obligations throughout history. It has been poetry’s distinction to go out into the street, to take part in this or that combat. The poet didn’t scare off when they said he was a rebel. Poetry is rebellion. The poet was not offended when he was called subversive. Life transcends all structures, and there are new rules of conduct for the soul. The seed sprouts anywhere; all ideas are exotic; we wait for enormous changes every day; we live through the mutation of human order avidly: spring is rebellious.
I have given all I had. I have thrown my poetry into the ring, and I have often bled with it, suffering the agonies and praising the moments of glory I have witnessed and lived through. I was sometimes misunderstood on one ground or another, and that’s not really so bad.
A critic from Ecuador has said that there are no more than six pages of real poetry in my book Las uvas y el viento. The Ecuadorian happened to read my book without love because it was a political book, just as other super-political critics detested my Residencia en la tierra because they considered it too inward and gloomy. Even such an eminent writer as Juan Marinello condemned it in the past on moral grounds. I believe both are guilty of the same mistake, which springs from a common source.
