Books like Memoirs

Autobiography, yes, but big history, too, for Neruda was a sincere communist who met Mao, Ghandi and was fêted in the U.S.S.R. This poet was consequential; his poems frightened rightest despots. He was jailed by these hysterical non-communists, who at times worked with the U.S. and Chilean fascists. Early on there are amusing youthful exploits among his Chilean college friends. The tale of his mongoose’s encounter with a viper during a diplomatic mission to Sri Lanka (Ceylon) is hilarious. The book is compressed and very fast-paced. His life was enormously eventful. In Bueno Aries he meets Federico García Lorca, in Madrid the goatherd and poetic genius Miguel Hernández and Ramón Gómez de la Serna among others. The sections on the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) mesh nicely with my readings, particularly Hugh Thomas’s exhaustive history of the conflict, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Robert Capa’s Heart of Spain. I have the selected poems here, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, which is 1,000 pages long. A true “collected” might easily run to 2,500 pages, which strikes me as astonishing given the output of most poets. My favorite chapter here, among many excellent chapters, is “Poetry Is an Occupation,” for in it Neruda reveals much about his processes, intentions, influences, critics and literary friends, among them Paul Eluard, Pierre Reverdy, György Somlyó, Salvatore Quasimodo, César Vallejo, and fellow Chilean and Nobelist, Gabriela Mistral. The final pages here were written three days after the CIA-funded assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende, and eleven days before PN’s own death, at this writing still under investigation by an international team of forensic experts. (Please Google it.)“I got used to riding on horseback. My world expanded upward and outward along the towering mud trails, over roads with sudden curves. I encountered the tangled vegetation, the silence or the sounds of wild birds, the sudden outburst of a flowering tree dressed in scarlet robes like a gigantic archbishop of the mountains.... Or from time to time, when least expected, the copihue bell-flower, wild, untamable, indestructible, dangling from the thickets like a drop of fresh blood. Slowly I got used to the horse, the saddle, the stiff, complicated riding gear, the cruel spurs jangling at my heels. Along endless beaches or thicketed hills, a communion was started between my spirit— that is, my poetry— and the loneliest land in the world. That was many years ago, but that communion, that revelation, that pact with the wilderness, is still a part of my life.” (p. 18)“Shyness is a kink in the soul, a special category, a dimension that opens out into solitude. Moreover, it is an inherent suffering, as if we had two epidermises and the one underneath rebelled and shrank back from life. Of the things that make up a man, this quality, this damaging thing, is a part of the alloy that lays the foundation, in the long run, for the perpetuity of the self.” (p. 34)“What a great language I have, it’s a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors . . . They strode over the giant cordilleras, over the rugged Americas, hunting for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with a voracious appetite not found in the world since then . . . They swallowed up everything, religions, pyramids, tribes, idolotries just like the ones they brought along in their huge sacks . . . Wherever they went, they razed our land . . . But words fell like pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians, out of their beards, their helmets, their horseshoes, luminous words that were left glittering here . . . our language. We came up losers . . . We came up winners . . . The carried off the gold and left us the gold . . . They left us the words.” (p. 54)“Federico García Lorca had a premonition of his death. Once, shortly after returning from a theatrical tour, he called me up and told me about the strange incident. He had arrived with the La Barraca troupe at some out-of-the-way village in Castile and camped on the edge of town. Overtired because of the pressures on the trip, Federico could not sleep. He got up at dawn and went out to wander around alone. . . . He had stopped at the gate of an old estate, the entrance to the immense park of a feudal manor. Its state of abandonment, the hour, and the cold made the solitude even more penetrating. Suddenly Federico felt oppressed as if by something about to happen. . . . A tiny lamb came out to browse in the weeds among the ruins, appearing like an angel out of the mist, out of nowhere, to turn solitude into something human . . . . The poet no longer felt alone. Suddenly a heard of swine also came into the area. . . . Then Federico witnessed a bloodcurdling scene: the swine fell on the lamb and, to the great horror of poet, tore it to pieces and devoured it. . . . Three months before the Civil War, when he told me this chilling story, Federico was still haunted by the horror of it. Later on I saw, more and more clearly, that the incident had been a vision of his own death, the premonition of his incredible tragedy.” (p. 123)“Curzio Malaparte. . . stated it well in his article, ‘I am not a Communist, but if I were a Chilean poet, I would be one, like Pablo Neruda. You have to take sides here, with the Cadillacs or with the people who have no schooling or shoes.’ These people without schooling or shoes elected me senator on March 4, 1945. I shall always cherish with pride the fact that thousands of people in Chile’s most inhospitable region, the great mining region of copper and nitrate, gave me their vote. Walking over the pampa was laborious and rough. It hasn’t rained for half a century there, and the desert has done its work on the faces of the miners. They are men with scorched features; their solitude and the neglect they are consigned to has been fixed in the dark intensity of their eyes. Going from the desert up to the mountains, entering any needy home, getting to know the inhuman labor these people do, and feeling that the hopes of isolated and sunken men have been entrusted to you, is not a light responsibility.” (p. 166)“Ilya Ehrenburg, who was reading and translating my poems [into Russian], scolded me: too much root, too many roots in your poems. Why so many? It’s true. The frontier regions sank their roots into my poetry and these roots have never been able to wrench themselves out. My life is a long pilgrimage that is always turning on itself, always returning to the woods in the south, to the forest lost in me. There the huge trees were sometimes felled by their seven-hundred years of powerful life, uprooted by storms, blighted by the snow, or destroyed by fire. I have heard titanic trees crashing deep in the forest: the oak tree plunging down with the sound of a muffled cataclysm, as if pounding with a giant hand on the earth’s doors, asking for burial. But the roots are left out in the open, exposed to their enemy, time, to the dampness, to the lichens, to one destruction after another. Nothing more beautiful than those huge, open hands, wounded or burned, that tell us, when we come across them on a forest path, the secret of the buried tree, the mystery that nourished the leaves, the deep reaching muscles of the vegetable kingdom. Tragic and shaggy, they show us a new beauty: they are sculptures molded by the depths of the earth: nature’s secret masterpieces.” (p. 191)“What first impressed me in the U.S.S.R. was the feeling of immensity it gives, of unity within that vast country’s population, the movements of the birches on the plains, the huge forest so miraculously unspoiled, the great rivers, the horses running like waves across the wheat fields. I loved the Soviet land at first sight, and realized that not only does it offer a moral lesson for every corner of the globe, a way of comparing possibilities, an ever increasing progress in working together and sharing, but I sense, too, that an extraordinary flight would begin from this land of steppes, which preserved so much natural purity. The entire human race knows that a colossal truth is being worked out there, and the whole world waits eagerly to see what will happen. Some wait in terror, others simply wait, still others believe they can see what is coming.” (p. 194)“All this persecution came to a head one morning in Naples . . . The police came to my hotel. Using an alleged error in my passport as a pretext, they asked me to accompany them to the prefecture. There they offered me an espresso and informed me that I must leave Italian soil that same day . . . At the station in Rome . . . I was able to make out an enormous crowd from my window. I heard shouting. I saw great commotion and confusion. Armfuls of flowers advanced toward the train, raised over a river of heads. ‘Pablo! Pablo!’ . . . When I went down the car’s steps, elegantly guarded, I became the center of a swirling melee. In a matter of seconds, men and women writers, newsmen, deputies, perhaps close to a thousand persons, snatched me away from the hands of the police. During these dramatic moments I made out a few famous faces. Alberto Moravia and his wife, Elsa Morante, like him a novelist. The eminent painter Renato Guttuso. Other poets. Other painters. Carlo Levi, the celebrated author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, was holding out a bouquet of roses. In the midst of all this, flowers were spilling to the ground, hats and umbrellas flew, fist blows sounded like explosions. The police were getting the worst of it, and I was once more recovered by my friends. During the scuffle I had a glimpse of gentle Elsa Morante striking a policeman on the head with a silk parasol. Suddenly the luggage hand trucks were going by and I saw one of the porters, a corpulent facchino, bring a club down on a policeman‘s back. These were the Roman people backing me up . . . The crowd was shouting: ‘Neruda stays in Rome. Neruda is not leaving Italy! Let the poet stay! Let the Chilean stay! . . .’” (p. 213)“In Stalin’s case, I have contributed my share to the personality cult. But in those days Stalin had seemed to us the conqueror who had crushed Hitler‘s armies, the savior of all humanity. The deterioration of his character was a mysterious process, still an enigma for many of us. And now, here in plain sight, in the vast expanse of the new China’s land and skies [Neruda was on the Yangtze], once more a man was turning into a myth right before my eyes. A myth destined to lord it over the revolutionary conscience, to put in one man’s grip the creation of a world that must belong to all. I could not swallow that bitter pill a second time.” (p. 237)