I would like her to know me as an ordinary person, a young man who is striving to do something of value. It would spoil everything if she knew what I have done. But you know all this now . . . I am leaving tomorrow for a meeting in Delano, but I will be back next Monday; then back to my work again for three weeks. After that, however, I will be on my way to San Francisco for the Conference (United Nations) where I will stay for five days; then back again, perhaps to Los Angeles for the final check-up on my manuscript. After that, Dee, it is hard to tell—but I do need someone who understands me and can help me, especially with my typing and when I am lonely. I am often attacked by melancholia now, but maybe it is because I am writing vividly about my childhood in Binalonan.
Of all the American women married to Pinoys, I think you understand me best; and you knew me when I had nothing. Remember how I used to sit in your apartment waiting for something to eat? Those were the days, Dee! But I am glad that tragedy is over now, or nearly so.
But now I must stop writing because I am tired. How white the buildings are on the hills facing my window! And above them is a clean, blue sky, where a bright summer-like sun is softening in the dying day. And in the vacant lot across the street, how green is the grass, tall and lusty in the spring air! Someday soon I will go there and pick some of the sunflowers whose blossoms scintillate like camellias, like the merry laughter of a child who knows only mother and love in the world.
Sincerely,
CB
SOUND OF FALLING LIGHT, PAGES 204–5
CB TO RODRIGO FERIA
22 June 1942
Los Angeles, California
Dear Rudy:
I am rushing this note about Chorus for America. Parker and I had a brief conference this afternoon. The book is beautiful. I think it is one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen. Altogether there are fifty pages—including, of course, blank pages on both ends. However the book is not yet for distribution.
I couldn’t come to Stockton as I had promised. If I came I would have stopped many things here. I just received a letter from my agent and now he is rushing me with the story of my life. You know, I just gave him an outline. Lieber likes it very much, but honestly he advised me about my intellectualism. He thinks I have become too intellectual to be readable to the general public. I have always wanted to write simply, but I am afraid that I have really become too intellectual in my writings of late. Joe read a piece I wrote some time ago about my search for roots in America, and I am afraid he knew that the life I was describing is lived too much in the mind.
But as my body decays and slowly crumbles to uselessness my mind becomes solid and crystalized. The most important thing for a young writer to have is health. Somehow I became convinced of the validity of some of my beliefs. So far I have put you in a book (Chorus for America) which is the first of its kind to appear in the world. When the war is over, perhaps you shall find something in it. When you do remember that we have some rights (for instance, the writing and publication of Chorus for America), yet we think casually about the freedom of writing. There were centuries when writing was a crime punishable by death. There were times when intelligence was a serious crime. So, Rudy, in our exuberance, remember how we became privileged to think and speak and write.
Do you still remember that story about my father and I? We were living in the barrio, just father and I, and once or twice a year we went to town. We attended only the Christmas holidays and the general elections. This time father and I attended the elections. I was five, and father carried me on his back. When we reached the presidencia my father stopped suddenly as if struck by a knife at the back, but twisting about I saw that my father was reverently looking up at our flag which was flying above the presidencia. Then tears began to fall from his eyes and creep down his windbitten face. My father wept silently. For years, Rudy, I could not understand what it meant. But many years later it came to me, and I cried remembering my father and his great love for our native land. He cried when he saw the flag he fought for. Rudy, there were great men in our history. My father was one. Great personalities are not only those who are remembered in history. There are great men like my father.
I could go on and on with this letter, but now I am tired and hungry. It is strange that I can never talk to people; that it is only when I write that I become eloquent. I like to talk to people, but I realize that most of them lack the imagination to perceive what I want to say. Talking is poetry to me, and my whole life is poetry. But now I must stop this letter because somebody is waiting for me in the room.
Do you know that I will probably get a contract and an advance from one of the biggest publishers in America (Harcourt, Brace) in about a month or so? My agent is merely waiting for three chapters of my autobiography. There are two agents wrangling over my autobiography. The woman is very commercial, but the man (Maxim Lieber) has imagination and political understanding.
Why don’t you send those two girls at the University some picture cards? I have always wanted to give people something. A signature, or maybe an old letter or anything at all. If history proves it valueless, at least it’s a sentimental remembrance from a guy who was the cesspool of vice and virtue, tenderness and cruelty, love and hate.
So good luck
CB
* * *
—
These next four letters, written in New York City between 1944 and 1945, comprise a series of brief notes to Grace F. Cunningham, a fellow writer who focused on the Filipino experience under the pseudonym Lysle Carveth, on the process of revising and editing America Is in the Heart for Harcourt, Brace. At one point, Bulosan muses about sharing a meal with Richard Wright, the prominent African American novelist who serves as inspiration for the protagonist of America Is in the Heart. In On Becoming Filipino, San Juan reminds us that Bulosan’s publication of The New Tide in 1934 connected him with progressive authors—Richard Wright, William Saroyan, William Carlos Williams, Louis Adamic, and others. Bulosan’s letters to Cunningham also shed light on his adjustment to New York City as a West Coast Pinoy.
SOUND OF FALLING LIGHT, PAGE 212
CB TO GRACE F. CUNNINGHAM
27 August 1944
Hotel New Yorker
New York
Dear Grace:
I have just arrived and a splitting headache is bothering me terribly. After a while I will lie down and then start reading all the manuscripts. There is so much life and activity in New York. I would like to be a part of it. I have a corner room and I can see two sides of the city; there are many tall buildings rising into the sky, majestic and fecund with life. There seems to be an immense joy in me when I am at a great height. Perhaps the eagle has the same imperial feeling, for it dies when stricken out of the free sky.
You must come again to New York. It is America. It is so different from the West, from any other part of this country. It is nebulous, dynamic. To engineer the construction of one of these skyscrapers demands extraordinary talent. I could never conceive the fundamental structure of a skyscraper. The physical wealth of America alone is inconceivable. But let us not forget there is also wealth in beauty and goodness, and love and happiness. We have lived too fast and too foolishly; we have forgotten this great wealth in the human heart. Perhaps there will come a time when we will reckon love and goodness as wealth.
CB
SOUND OF FALLING LIGHT, PAGE 213
CB TO GRACE CUNNINGHAM
4 December 1944
New York
Dear Grace:
I don’t seem to like New York; I think the women here are more cosmopolitan (or shall I say realistic) than anywhere else in the country. Sometimes they frighten me; but maybe it is because I have come from a part of the United States where we are still a little primitive and we don’t have the hard realism of these New Yorkers. At least that is what I have seen here and I’m afraid of
the city: it is too big . . .
I have not yet started revising my autobiography (America Is in the Heart); there is an enormous work to be done. I don’t know if I will be able to finish it before the month is over, but I will try my best. My company is very much interested in this book; I hope it will be interesting when it is done.
CB
SOUND OF FALLING LIGHT, PAGES 213–14
CB TO GRACE F. CUNNINGHAM
December (?) 1944
New York
Dear Grace:
I received your telegram last night when I was in my room. There is nothing wrong with me. I’m in my room almost all the time. That is why I can’t write much because I don’t know where to get stamps and envelopes. There is no telegraph service at my hotel. It is in Greenwich Village, you know. My shirts are all dirty now; I have no time to go to town. I have not even fulfilled some of our appointments. Anyway, I just don’t know where to get to the nearest telegraph office. It is too cold outside and my California overcoat is not much to speak about.
I have been in all day today without eating (Monday) but I could ask for something to eat from the service room. I started working on my manuscript early this morning and it is now nearly seven in the evening. I have not eaten anything and I am tired. My hair is also getting long. Very soon I’ll need a Pinoy haircut. Very soon I will go to Brooklyn and look for a barbershop; perhaps I will eat with Richard Wright.
I have finished going over the manuscript but I will go over it again before I give it to the typist. Then I will go over it again before I give it to the company. They expect something out of it, but I feel uneasy because it was written in a great hurry. I will never do that again!
CB
SOUND OF FALLING LIGHT, PAGES 214–15
CB TO GRACE F. CUNNINGHAM
January (?) 1945
New York
Dear Grace:
I’m going over my manuscript again for the second time, because I would like to see it once more before I leave for California. I know that the moment Harcourt, Brace gets it they will send it to the printers right away. I think I’ll finish it sometime this coming Saturday; a typist will pick it up in the morning. I hope she will finish it in five days because now I have very little time left . . .
I think this is going to be my book. I’m only a little chagrinned that I did not take time to write it. I will never write a book again in so short a time because it is a loss of energy and time. As soon as I finish my work, I will try to go around the city and see what it is like. There may be something here that will interest me.
CB
* * *
—
The following two letters, written in Los Angeles in 1945 and 1948, are addressed to Jose de los Reyes, a fellow Filipino activist-intellectual in the United States. Despite his location in the United States, Bulosan never left the Philippines. He remained engaged with writers and politics in Philippine society. This is evident in his reflection on the fate of writers in the Philippines under the brutality of Japanese occupation: Manuel Arguilla (author of “How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife”), Alfredo E. Litiatco (editor of Graphic), Federico Mangahas (founder of the Philippine Writers League), Salvador P. Lopez (author of Literature and Society), Agustin Fabian (pioneering writer in Tagalog), and Leon O. Ty (editor of The Liberator, an underground guerrilla news magazine under Japanese occupation). While very much connected to cultural and political life in the Philippines (Filipino diplomat Carlos P. Romulo and Philippine presidents Sergio Osmeña and Manuel Roxas are mentioned), Bulosan also grasped the specificity of racial subordination in the United States. He was drawn to learning about the African American struggle against racial and economic injustice. Bulosan’s keen understanding of the racial/national subordination of the Filipino people sustained his calling as a writer and informed his support for other authors, such as Grace F. Cunningham, who wrote about the Filipino experience.
SOUND OF FALLING LIGHT, PAGE 217
CB TO JOSE DE LOS REYES
1945 (?)
Los Angeles, California
Dear Joe:
I have news from Manila. Manuel Arguilla is dead. Litiatco is dead too. Mangahas is now Roxas’s publicity man (he was in jail only a while back—collaboration). Lopez is captain in the Philippine Army. Fabian of the old Graphic is still alive, Leon O. Ty of the Free Press is now a lawyer editing a magazine on the side, The Liberator.
Grace’s book, Jungle Boy is now out. It is a beautiful book, done with love. Even the artist did her best. Angkot, the wonderful Negrito you used to tell me about is, of course, the hero of the book. Some distortions of names, but the story as a whole is warm, human, and lyrical. Her next manuscript, Moro Boy, is now in the hands of the publishers; and I am encouraging her to write several more about the Islands. We need all kinds of writers to publicize our country; there must be no jealousies for the sake of the Filipino people.
My editor, John Woodburn, has been sending me wonderful books lately. Today I received Black Metropolis, a study of Negro life in Chicago. The . . . authors are St. Clair Drake, an anthropologist at Chicago; and Horace Cayton, a sociologist and Rosenwald Fellow. Both are Negroes. I met Drake at Harcourt, Brace last year. He was then in the Navy.
This is all for a while until I see you again. If you could get in touch with Confessor (Tomas) I would like to see his manuscript; maybe something will come out of it. News is coming back that I’m very famous in my hometown and other places. But it is nothing new.
CB
SOUND OF FALLING LIGHT, PAGES 244–45
CB TO JOSE DE LOS REYES
4 February 1948
Los Angeles, California
Dear Joe:
Your letter came the other day and I was happy to hear from you again. Did I tell you that there are two pages about me in Current Biography, Volume 7, and that Roxas is the only other Filipino? Some two years ago, Who’s Who also carried me in its pages, and that time Romulo and Osmena were mentioned only in the appendix. I have also published the most stories in America last year, according to the appendix of The Best American Short Stories of 1947 edited by Martha Foley.
America Is in the Heart was dramatized in New York and Los Angeles by groups fighting for racial tolerance in America . . . this book is important in that it reveals, for the first time, our plight in America, and also in the islands. I could have written a great and wonderful book, but I worked too fast, and the company was in a hurry to bring it out; so that what we have now is imperfect and fragmentary; but perhaps I will write a sequel someday.
I have been asked by a company that specializes in poetry to edit an anthology of Philippine poetry. But I don’t know if there is enough material; anyway I have asked for some help from Manila. I already have a collection of Philippine short stories which, unfortunately, is still looking for a publisher. I will have two volumes of my own stories ready soon; so these two anthologies of Philippine writing and the novel I’m working on will make a total of five book-length manuscripts this year. I will also try to collect my poems into a little volume; with a long one-act play which I have in mind, to follow the novel. I will have seven manuscripts for my agent. That is not bad, eh? I’m finally back to my stride again. I hope to fulfill my promise of fifty volumes in my lifetime. Perhaps someday your children will be looking at a big shelf of my own books, fifty of them, and wondering what kind of a guy I was to write so furiously and angrily in so brief a time.
“Look,” they would probably say, “Just look at this crazy peasant who thought he could lick the world! Now he is dead. Did he love many women? Did he hate many men? He must have been queer like Whitman and Hart Crane. Understand he never married. Let’s read his letters; perhaps he revealed himself there.”
It would be fun to hear them talk about me.
Are you familiar with the life o
f Joaquin Murrieta, the Mexican bandit? And Saladin, conqueror of the ancient world against Christianity? I am fascinated by their lives and works; perhaps someday I will write a novel based on their times and lives. And Scarlatti, too, the first great Italian violinist. And Alexander Pushkin. And Rizal, of course.
Tell me about your work and your life. It is raining outside, but somewhere in the world I can see luminous rays of the sun. Somewhere there is a star for me. Wait for me, star of hope!
Sincerely,
CB
* * *
—
These two letters are from Bulosan’s final years in Seattle, Washington. The first is addressed to Dorothy Babb from the Firland Sanatorium in 1953. The second is addressed to Florentino B. Valeros in 1955. Dorothy Babb was a writer-photographer and sister of proletarian writer Sanora Babb. Beginning in the 1930s, the Babb sisters encouraged Bulosan’s artistic and political development. Dorothy and Sanora appear in America Is in the Heart as the Odell sisters. Florentino B. Valeros was a professor of English and Philippine literature at the National Teachers College and the University of the East in the Philippines.
Bulosan’s commitment to the Filipino people as a writer-activist was always framed by his desire to “make the world a better, happier place” for all oppressed and exploited peoples. His letter to Babb denaturalizes hate, greed, selfishness, and war—“we should have a Department of Peace in the cabinet, instead of a Department of War.” He ends his letter with an inventory of books from around the world—to arm the spirit and to nurture a radical literary imagination. In his letter to Valeros, Bulosan discusses his work with the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), Local 37—his commitment to protecting the rights of Filipino labor activists. Bulosan’s generation (the Manongs) paved the way for the United Farm Workers in the 1960s. He also describes his “making as a writer”—his influences and his artistic-political vision.
America Is in the Heart Page 36
