Neruda

The Biography of a Poet

Mark Eisner

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780062694218
• eBook ISBN: 9780062694225
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte

A Finalist for the PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography  

The most definitive biography to date of the poet Pablo Neruda, a moving portrait of one of the most intriguing and influential figures in Latin American history

Few poets have captured the global imagination like Pablo Neruda. In his native Chile, across Latin America, and in many other parts of the world, his name and legacy have become almost synonymous with liberation movements, and with the language of erotic love.

Neruda: The Poet’s Calling is the product of fifteen years of research by Mark Eisner, writer, translator, and documentary filmmaker. The book vividly depicts Neruda’s monumental life, potent verse, and ardent belief in the “poet’s obligation” to use poetry for social good. It braids together three major strands of Neruda’s life—his world-revered poetry; his political engagement; and his tumultuous, even controversial, personal life—forming a single cohesive narrative of intimacy and breadth.

The fascinating events of Neruda’s life are interspersed with Eisner’s thoughtful examinations of the poems, both as works of art in their own right and as mirrors of Neruda’s life and times. The result is a book that animates Neruda’s riveting story in a new way—one that offers a compelling narrative version of Neruda’s life and work, undergirded by exhaustive research, yet designed to bring this colossal literary figure to a broader audience.

 

Chapter One

To Temuco

A man was born

among many

who were born.

He lived among many men

who also lived,

and that alone is not so much history

as earth itself,

the central part of Chile, where

vines unwind their green tresses,

grapes feed on the light,

wine is born from the feet of the people.

—“The Birth”

Pablo Neruda’s father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales, grew up in the late nineteenth century on a farm outside the town of Parral, two hundred miles south of the Chilean capital, Santiago. The landscape there was picturesque: well-irrigated orchards, flower farms, and vineyards stretching across fields at the foothills of the Andes. In this long, thin country, never more than 110 miles wide, Parral sat in the shadows of the mountains some sixty miles east of the Pacific Ocean. The area was short on rainfall but long on hot, dry sun, unusual for the fertile Central Valley. So all that beauty didn’t count for much when it came to feeding an extensive family from land that lacked good access to water, which was the case for José del Carmen’s parents on their hacienda-type farm. They had named it Belén, the Spanish spelling for Bethlehem.

José del Carmen had inherited his mother’s striking blue eyes, but she, Natalia Morales, barely had time to look into them; she died shortly after giving birth, in 1872. He was left to his imposing father, José Angel Reyes Hermosilla. The authoritarian patriarch wanted to instill the fear of God in José del Carmen and the thirteen more children he’d have with a new wife. His booming voice was frightening. He rarely cracked a smile.

Their property had a little more than 250 cultivable acres, which was rather modest compared with other haciendas of that type in Chile at the time. They struggled to eke out a subsistence living farming its soil. The family had little money to invest in crops and animals, or in rich rootstock for vines. With fourteen children, there were simply too many mouths to feed on a farm that didn’t have enough hands of age to successfully work the stubborn soil.

As José del Carmen grew, so did his frustration with farm life. Despite all their acreage, he felt claustrophobic with so many siblings and an overbearing father. In 1891, at the age of twenty, he took his dreams for a different life to the burgeoning salty port town of Talcahuano, 150 miles by steam train to the southwest, where a great public works project had just begun. It was a whole new world, and a stark contrast to the confines of repressive religion back at Belén. Here the future was open and his responsibilities were few, and shortly after he arrived he joined a team building dry docks down by the wharf.

José del Carmen’s home in Talcahuano was a cold pension run by a Catalan widow with three young daughters. The pension was only a few blocks from the port, and it housed a few other dockworkers who had come from the provinces for work. José del Carmen’s sense of possibilities was sparked further by the social interaction within this urban society in an international port—so different from the enclosed, rigid world of Belén and the small, provincial Parral. Meanwhile, he was witnessing a historic period of transformation in southern Chile, with the import of machinery to exploit the land and turn it into an agricultural region, and the export of some of the first products.

His time at the port moved him further away from the influence of his father, allowing him to find his own identity and instilling in him a nonreligious, rational outlook on life. At the pension down by the docks, he came to know the owner’s teenage daughter Aurelia Tolrá, who would become a close confidante. As José wandered between Parral and Talcahuano in search of work, the pension would be an important location to which he’d return often.

* * *

Charles Sumner Mason was born in Portland, Maine, in 1829. He would come to play a fundamental role in Neruda’s life. While many Europeans immigrated to Chile, especially the south, very few North Americans did. Though his exact motivation for traveling to South America isn’t certain, after a supposed stop in Peru, he came to Parral in 1866 at the age of thirty-seven. He arrived with another American (Henry “Enrique” St. Clair), who was enticed by Chile’s rich mineral deposits. At one point the two would formally set up a business venture to explore silver deposits in the hills.

Mason would soon involve himself in many matters in Parral. By 1891, when José del Carmen was starting his adventures and coming and going from the farm outside Parral, Mason marked his twenty-fifth anniversary of living in Chile. He was a well-settled family man, husband to Micaela Candia, the daughter of an important Parral businessman. He was the father of eight. He was so widely respected during his life that people would often ask him to arbitrate disputes. He even represented José del Carmen’s father in a lawsuit in 1889.

Eventually Mason headed to the newly founded pioneer town of Temuco, some two hundred miles to the south. There, he and his family could expand on what they had established in Parral, taking advantage of all the opportunities that the exciting frontier could offer. Temuco and its surroundings were Chile’s “Far West,” as Neruda would describe it in his memoirs. Just two decades earlier, the indigenous Mapuche people of the region—an area of ancient forests, snowcapped volcanoes, and breathtaking volcanic lakes—had finally submitted to the Chilean military. The Mapuche’s three-century-long resistance, dating back to 1535, had constituted the longest continual war of indigenous people defending their native lands and rights against colonial encroachment in the history of the Americas. With the Mapuche defeated, the town of Temuco was formed in 1881 next to a Chilean fort, where the peace accords were finally signed that same year.

The virgin territory now being relatively safe for settlement and exploitation, Mason, among others, wanted to be sure to get in on the opportunity. In 1888, shortly after his father-in-law died (there’s no record of the date of his mother-in-law’s death), Mason began to act in earnest toward his new ambition. That year he placed a small ad in a regional newspaper offering his services as a bookkeeper. Through this work, he was able to provide critical help to all the entrepreneurs setting up new businesses in the south who had little formal business experience. With his skill and integrity, he earned trust and respect among the key players in Temuco. Combining this with his ease at establishing personal relationships, he quickly ascended to the top of the city’s social and political scene.

Mason was still going back and forth between Temuco and Parral when his seventh child, Laura, was born in 1889. By 1891, the whole family had moved to Temuco for good. Nearly all of his wife Micaela’s seven siblings moved there with him.

The national railroad arrived in Temuco in 1893, a seminal event in a burgeoning frontier town. In 1897, Mason built the Hotel de la Estación right in front of the station—fifty meters from the ticket window, to be exact—on land he had managed to obtain at a significant discount or perhaps even through a free land grant. It advertised itself with the English title THE PASSENGER’S HOME, and noted SE HABLA INGLÉS, ALEMÁN Y FRANCÉS. The hotel allowed Mason to further strengthen his social and political influence in up-and-coming Temuco, as government functionaries, businessmen, important members of the state railroad company, political candidates on their campaigns, and tourists all would either stay or at least eat at the hotel. It also became a meeting place for local politicians.

Not long after he turned twenty-one, José del Carmen traveled by train to Temuco. Its population had just passed ten thousand, with some twenty-five thousand people pioneering the countryside around it. The town was dominated by a recent wave of mostly Swiss German immigrants. The Chilean government wanted to set up an agricultural economy, particularly to help meet the growing food demands of miners in the arid north, where the mining industry was booming. In order to attract people who had enough capital and capability to exploit the virgin frontier, the Chilean government enacted the Law of Selective Immigration—“selective” as in only upstanding European citizens looking for new opportunities and of a sufficient socioeconomic level who would be able to colonize and enrich the area. Toward this end, these immigrants were granted swaths of land, tax exemptions, and other incentives. They would form a broad society, founding new towns and cities and dominating local politics, while establishing ties between the region and the national political scene as never before. They would dominate the social and class structure of the region for decades.

José del Carmen would also witness the domestic migration of adventurous Chileans of all economic stripes to the incipient town, people looking for the excitement of uncharted territory and the opportunities that come from expansion, as Mason and his relatives had done. The remainder of the population was mostly former soldiers who settled down after the war against the Mapuche and the War of the Pacific, hoping to find jobs, and people teetering on the edge of tenement life in Santiago who had enough to head south to try their luck. These latter groups offered a striking contrast to the European colonials and other more “dignified” citizenry. The recently incarcerated, the desperate and jobless, and the former soldiers often drank excessively, which frequently led to fist and knife fights. Newcomers dealt with a variety of new challenges, including the need to fortify themselves against the cold of seemingly endless winters drenched in rain, now being so close to the southern tip of South America.

Temuco was colorful and studded with diverse characters both within its borders and outside of town, such as the huasos, the gentlemen of the countryside who would ride their white horses into town for supplies and drink. These men were extremely skilled horsemen, often landowners, and they distinguished themselves with their short, colorful ponchos decorated in broad primary-color stripes and their flat-brimmed black straw hats rimmed with ribbon, called chupallas. Even the stirrups of their saddles were carved by hand. They had maintained this artisan craft as they migrated from the north over the previous decades.

When José del Carmen first stepped off the train onto the muddy platform, he saw a station crowded with women wearing floor-length dresses and ornate bonnets escorted by men in suits, the local gentry. There were also people in simpler clothes, those in laborers’ threads, and a few vendors in well-worn sombreros selling bread and cheese for those about to take the train north.

José would have been amazed to see another kind of people: the Mapuche. These indigenous people were so low on the social scale that they weren’t considered part of the town’s population and were forbidden to live within its confines. The women wore beautiful, distinctive silver jewelry over their wide black ponchos; the men wore ponchos of many colors. The majority of Chilean citizens, including those in power, treated the Mapuche as outcasts.

Because they were not allowed to live within the boundaries of Temuco itself, the Mapuche came into town from the fields and forests to trade and left at night, the men on horseback, the women on foot. Most of the Mapuche couldn’t read Spanish, and their native language, Mapudungun, had no written form. Thus, as José walked the streets that first day, he kept looking up at the enormous representations of objects hanging outside stores to convey what goods they sold: “an enormous cooking pot, a gigantic padlock, an Antarctic spoon,” as Neruda would later recount in his memoirs. “Farther along the street, shoe stores, a colossal boot.”

Mason knew of José del Carmen from José’s father, but José del Carmen was just one of his friend’s fourteen children. José may have spent a few nights in Temuco, but he wouldn’t have been able to just stay for free at the hotel, nor would Mason have had a job waiting for him. So José continued his travels back and forth between Talcahuano and Parral, scraping together work as he found it. It was an austere but free life. But then, on a visit to Temuco in 1895, José had an intimate encounter with Trinidad, Mason’s sister-in-law. He had a wanderer’s charm, and the twenty-six-year-old Trinidad, whose long, angular face was more interesting than beautiful, had little to entertain her in Mason’s frontier compound.

It was a short-lived passion, but it had lifelong ramifications for both. This affair would be one of several clandestine relationships conducted by people with some relation to Charles Mason. Neruda’s childhood was undeniably influenced by these unspoken histories and their repercussions.

Trinidad knew the consequences of taking a lover. Four years earlier, the first of several secret scandals had occurred. Trinidad had a son, Orlando, from an earlier affair with Rudecindo Ortega, a twenty-two-year-old seasonal farm laborer whom Mason had invited down from Parral to help him get things started in Temuco. Micaela and Mason, the boy’s aunt and uncle, were irate at Trinidad’s indiscretion and quickly adopted Orlando. The circumstances of Orlando’s birth were never mentioned outside Mason’s household.

Rudecindo Ortega never lost the grace of his employer, as Mason had been so fond of him before the scandal and apparently found him less culpable than Trinidad. Later, Mason would even allow Ortega to marry his youngest daughter, Telésfora.

Trinidad and José del Carmen hid their affair from Mason and Micaela, but Trinidad became pregnant, forcing the secret to light. Mason and Micaela were furious that she had been so reckless under their roof; each adopted baby came with the risk of social disgrace, and they searched for the right punishment for the young woman who, it seemed, could not accept that she was supposed to remain chaste until marriage. Trinidad revealed who the father was, and word was sent to him. José del Carmen was in Belén or Talcahuano when he found out, and he replied quickly, unmoved and refusing to marry Trinidad. Unlike with her first child, Micaela and Mason made it clear that under no circumstances would they see or raise this baby.

Far along in her pregnancy, Trinidad returned to Parral to give birth, most likely because there she would have the support of her local relatives and friends. She would be kept from the public scrutiny of Temuco, and, as she had left Parral many years before, none of the townsfolk would know that she was not married.

In 1897, Trinidad gave birth to her second son, Rodolfo, but Micaela and Mason (supposedly) prohibited her from keeping him. The baby was handed off to a midwife in the village of Coipúe, along the banks of the silver Toltén River. It was far enough away from Temuco and close enough to Parral so that it was easy for the Masons to keep tabs on him and send the midwife support.

For the next five years, José del Carmen drifted between working at the dry docks of Talcahuano, visiting Temuco to see if there were any good railroad jobs available, and occasionally returning home to Belén to rest and perhaps pick up a little wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: To Temuco
• 2: Where the Rain Was Born
• 3: Awkward Adolescence
• 4: The Young Poet
• 5: Bohemian Twilights
• 6: Desperate Songs
• 7: Dead Gallop
• 8: Afar
• 9: Opium and Marriage
• 10: An Interlude
• 11: Spain in the Heart
• 12: Birth and Destruction
• 13: I Picked a Road
• 14: América
• 15: Senator Neruda
• 16: The Flight
• 17: Exile and Matilde
• 18: Matilde and Stalin
• 19: Fully Empowered
• 20: Triumph, Destruction, Death
• 21: The Flowers That Sleep
• Epilogue
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix I: Selected Poems in Their Full Length
• Appendix II: On the Importance of Poetry in Chile
• Basic Chronology
• Books by Pablo Neruda and Their Selected In-Print English Translations
• Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources
• Notes
• Index
• Photos Section
• Credits
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher