To the New World

A very cold winter's night, so silent that the air seemed frozen, and, since there was no moon, congealed to the stillness of glass spread over England. Ponds and ditches were frozen; the puddles made glazed eyes in the roads, and on the pavement the frost had raised slippery knobs. Darkness pressed on the windows; towns had merged themselves in open country. No light shone, save when a searchlight rayed round the sky, and stopped, here and there, as if to ponder some fleecy patch.


In the chapter “1917” of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years, Eleanor Pargiter has gone to the home of Renny and Maggie in Westminster. London is darkened because of the war and Germany’s strategic bombing raids. When Eleanor arrives she finds that Maggie’s sister, Sara, is also there accompanied by a mysterious guest whom she calls Nicholas. With the children upstairs in bed, the party is dining in the cellar when, in the midst of the dinner, sirens sound in the street outside. Then a distant boom sounds. Anti-aircraft batteries ring the city, and as the party guests listen anxiously, at intervals the booming guns sound closer until one fires quite near the house. They wait for the bomb to fall.

"On top of us," said Nicholas, looking up. They all looked up. At any moment a bomb might fall. There was dead silence. One, two, three, four, Eleanor counted. The spider's web was swaying. That stone may fall, she thought, fixing a certain stone with her eyes. Then a gun boomed again. It was fainter – further away. "That's over," said Nicholas. He shut his watch with a click. And they all turned and shifted on their hard chairs as if they had been cramped.

"Now we will have some wine," said Renny. He examined one bottle; then another; finally he took a third and wiped it carefully with the tail of his dressing-gown. He placed the bottle on a wooden case and they sat round in a circle.

"It didn't come to much, did it?" said Sara. She was tilting back her chair as she held out her glass.

"Ah, but we were frightened," said Nicholas. "Look--how pale we all are." They looked at each other. Draped in their quilts and dressing-gowns, against the grey-green walls, they all looked whitish, greenish.

"It's partly the light," said Maggie. "Eleanor," she said, looking at her, "looks like an abbess." The deep-blue dressing-gown which hid the foolish little ornaments, the tabs of velvet and lace on her dress, had improved her appearance. Her middle-aged face was crinkled like an old glove that has been creased into a multitude of fine lines by the gestures of a hand.

"Untidy, am I?" she said, putting her hand to her hair.

"No. Don't touch it," said Maggie. "And what were we talking about before the raid?" Eleanor asked. Again she felt that they had been in the middle of saying something very interesting when they were interrupted.

But there had been a complete break; none of them could remember what they had been saying.

"Well, it's over now," said Sara. "So let's drink a health - Here's to the New World!" she exclaimed. She raised her glass with a flourish. They all felt a sudden desire to talk and laugh.

"Here's to the New World!" they all cried, raising their glasses, and clinking them together. The five glasses filled with yellow liquid came together in a bunch.

"To the New World!" they cried and drank. The yellow liquid swayed up and down in their glasses.

"What are you thinking, Eleanor?" Nicholas interrupted her. He calls me Eleanor, she thought; that's right.

"About the new world . . ." she said aloud. "D'you think we're going to improve?" she asked.

"Yes, yes," he said, nodding his head. He spoke quietly as if he did not wish to rouse Renny who was reading, or Maggie who was darning, or Sara who was lying back in her chair half asleep. They seemed to be talking, privately, together.

"But how. . ." she began, "--how can we improve ourselves . . . live more. . ."--she dropped her voice as if she were afraid of waking sleepers--". . . live more naturally . . . better . . . How can we?"

"It is only a question," he said--he stopped. He drew himself close to her--"of learning. The soul . . ." Again he stopped.

"Yes--the soul?" she prompted him.

"The soul--the whole being," he explained. He hollowed his hands as if to enclose a circle. "It wishes to expand; to adventure; to form-new combinations?"

"Yes, yes," she said, as if to assure him that his words were right.

"Whereas now,"--he drew himself together; put his feet together; he looked like an old lady who is afraid of mice--"this is how we live, screwed up into one hard little, tight little--knot?"

"Knot, knot--yes, that's right," she nodded.

"Each is his own little cubicle; each with his own cross or holy book; each with his fire, his wife .
. ."

"Darning socks," Maggie interrupted.

Eleanor started. She had seemed to be looking into the future. But they had been overheard. Their privacy was ended. Renny threw down his paper.

"It's all damned rot!" he said. Whether he referred to the paper, or to what they were saying, Eleanor did not know. But talk in private was impossible.

"Why d'you buy them then?" she said, pointing to the papers.

"To light fires with," said Renny. Maggie laughed and threw down the sock she was mending.

"There!" she exclaimed. "Mended. . . ." Again they sat silent, looking at the fire. Eleanor wished that he would go on talking--the man she called Nicholas. When, she wanted to ask him, when will this new world come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave? He seemed to have released something in her; she felt not only a new space of time, but new powers, something unknown within her. She watched his cigarette moving up and down. Then Maggie took the poker and struck the wood and again a shower of red-eyed sparks went volleying up the chimney. We shall be free, we shall be free, Eleanor thought.


It has been barely two weeks now since the Coronavirus stay-at-home quarantine began and already people are anxious to know what the outcome will be, what the other side will look like. There are predictions, some roseate, some belligerent, that people who come through it will be dissatisfied with their old way of life that made them so complacent and vulnerable and that they will demand changes. A new world or at least a new world order.

In his play Plenty, David Hare wrote about the “postwar disillusion” of a woman named Susan Traherne, who was one of the few women to serve in the SOE, the precursor of MI5, during the Second World War. Her story is told by Hare out of chronological order beginning with a scene from 1962 and then jumping back in time to 1943 when Susan is just 17 and working with the French Resistance during the German occupation. Susan’s story then proceeds through eleven scenes until we're back in 1962. In the play’s last scene, Hare takes us back to August 1944. France has been liberated and Susan is in the French countryside. She is so struck by the beauty of the summer day and by her intense optimism that, from this moment, she resolves that everything will be different. “There will be days and days and days like this,” she exclaims. It is, of course, an ironic, bittersweet ending for the audience who has witnessed the gradual decline of Susan’s – and, by inference, England’s – optimism and faith in the future. It was naive, of course, of Susan to have expected the exhilaration of the war’s end to last for very long. It was a beautiful illusion. But, I think, one would have to have a heart of stone not to afford her such faith in the future when the world had accomplished so much.

There is a long way for us to go in this pandemic, the greatest challenge of humanity in our time. Plenty of time for us to reflect on what has got us here and to decide what we need (not what we want) to get us out. When our day of liberation comes (with a vaccine) there will be time for all of us to savor the moment. It's - at most - only a few months away. But what a long way we will all have come when that sweet days artives! 

To the New World!

The Years: 1913

I am reading Virginia Woolf’s next-to-last novel, The Years, a sort of family chronicle very unlike Galsworthy. More beautiful, personal and, of course, modern - published in 1937. It is divided into years in the lives of members of the Pargiter family, beginning in 1880 when most of the principal characters are children. A lot had happened to the family by the time Woolf got to 1913, including the death of the patriarch, Abel Pargiter. One of his daughters, Eleanor, to whom he was especially close because she never married and ran his household at Abercorn Terrace, has the onerous duty of selling the old house. It is one of the most moving parts of the novel (I haven’t yet finished it). So moving that I felt compelled to post a part of it here.


1913

It was still snowing when the young man came from the House Agents to see over Abercorn Terrace. The snow cast a hard white glare upon the walls of the bathroom, showed up the cracks on the enamel bath, and the stains on the wall. Eleanor stood looking out of the window. The trees in the back garden were heavily lined with snow; all the roofs were softly moulded with snow; it was still falling. She turned. The young man turned too. The light was unbecoming to them both, yet the snow—she saw it through the window at the end of the passage—was beautiful, falling.

Mr Grice turned to her as they went downstairs,

"The fact is, our clients expect more lavatory accommodation nowadays," he said, stopping outside a bedroom door.

Why can't he say "baths" and have done with it, she thought. Slowly she went downstairs. Now she could see the snow falling through the panels of the hall door. As he went downstairs, she noticed the red ears which stood out over his high collar; and the neck which he had washed imperfectly in some sink at Wandsworth. She was annoyed; as he went round the house, sniffing and peering, he had indicted their cleanliness, their humanity; and he used absurd long words. He was hauling himself up into the class above him, she supposed, by means of long words. Now he stepped cautiously over the body of the sleeping dog; took his hat from the hall table, and went down the front door-steps in his business man's buttoned boots, leaving yellow footprints in the thick white cushion of snow. A four-wheeler was waiting.

Eleanor turned. There was Crosby, dodging about in her best bonnet and mantle. She had been following Eleanor about the house like a dog all the morning; the odious moment could no longer be put off. Her four-wheeler was at the door; they had to say good-bye.

"Well, Crosby, it all looks very empty, doesn't it?" said Eleanor, looking in at the empty drawing-room. The white light of the snow glared in on the walls. It showed up the marks on the walls where the furniture had stood, where the pictures had hung.

"It does, Miss Eleanor," said Crosby. She stood looking too. Eleanor knew that she was going to cry. She did not want her to cry. She did not want to cry herself.

"I can still see you all sitting round that table, Miss Eleanor," said Crosby. But the table had gone. Morris had taken this; Delia had taken that; everything had been shared out and separated.

"And the kettle that wouldn't boil," said Eleanor. "D'you remember that?" She tried to laugh.

"Oh, Miss Eleanor," said Crosby, shaking her head, "I remember everything!" The tears were forming; Eleanor looked away into the further room.

There too were marks on the wall, where the bookcase had stood, where the writing-table had stood. She thought of herself sitting there, drawing a pattern on the blotting-paper; digging a hole, adding up tradesmen's books… . Then she turned. There was Crosby. Crosby was crying. The mixture of emotions was positively painful; she was so glad to be quit of it all, but for Crosby it was the end of everything.

She had known every cupboard, flagstone, chair and table in that large rambling house, not from five or six feet of distance as they had known it; but from her knees, as she scrubbed and polished; she had known every groove, stain, fork, knife, napkin and cupboard. They and their doings had made her entire world. And now she was going off, alone, to a single room at Richmond.

"I should think you'd be glad to be out of that basement anyhow, Crosby," said Eleanor, turning into the hall again. She had never realised how dark, how low it was, until, looking at it with "our Mr Grice," she had felt ashamed.

"It was my home for forty years, Miss," said Crosby. The tears were running. For forty years! Eleanor thought with a start. She had been a little girl of thirteen or fourteen when Crosby came to them, looking so stiff and smart. Now her blue gnat's eyes protruded and her cheeks were sunk.

Crosby was stooping to put Rover on the chain. 

"You're sure you want him?" said Eleanor, looking at the rather smelly, wheezy and unattractive old dog. "We could easily find a nice home for him in the country."

"Oh, miss, don't ask me to give him up!" said Crosby. Tears checked her speech. Tears were running freely down her cheeks. For all Eleanor could do to prevent it, tears formed in her eyes too.

"Dear Crosby, good-bye," she said. She bent and kissed her. She had a curious dry quality of skin she noticed. But her own tears were falling. Then Crosby, holding Rover on the chain, began to edge sideways down the slippery steps. Eleanor, holding the door open, looked after her. It was a dreadful moment; unhappy; muddled; altogether wrong. Crosby was so miserable; she was so glad. Yet as she held the door open her tears formed and fell. They had all lived here; she had stood here to wave Morris to school; there was the little garden in which they used to plant crocuses. And now Crosby, with flakes of snow falling on her black bonnet, climbed into the four-wheeler, holding Rover in her arms. Eleanor shut the door and went in.

War & Pride & Peace & Prejudice

As beloved a writer as Jane Austen (1775-1817) is, and has been for 200 years, too often a serious analysis of her "place" among English novelists arrives at the forbidding word "special". It is indeed a special place, for many reasons, some of them not as edifying as others. What Austen had to overcome to achieve her richly deserved place in English letters is, on examination, staggering. But what had that to do with her standing as a person of letters? When Werner Herzog went to downright dangerous lengths to make his film Fitzcarraldo, often putting his cast and crew in life-threatening situations, in order to maximize (I'm assuming) the film's realism, it didn't make the resulting film and better or worse than it is. And what viewer unacquainted with all of the film's backstory really cares how difficult it was to make Fitzcarraldo if he doesn't like it?

Jane Austen wrote exclusively about people in drawing rooms. Knowing what there is to know about the way she lived, it is perfectly fitting that she should have done so. She does so with great authority and great art. But some critics of Austen have, for 200 years, used the limitations that her life imposed on her writing against her. Herman Melville served in the U.S. Navy, jumped ship in Tahiti, and later manned whaling ships. Most of his novels, including his most famous, Moby-Dick, are drawn from that - very specialized - experience. No critic is his right mind would think of claiming that Melville's experience, just about as exclusively male as you could get in his lifetime, limited him as a novelist.

Virginia Woolf, who wrote novels to stand proudly beside Austen's, was perhaps more acutely self-conscious of being a woman writer than any of her predecessors, illustrious or otherwise. In October 1928, when asked to address students at Girton, the women's college at Oxford, she boldly told the students that before they can even consider taking up writing as a profession, they will need "money and a room of her own." One of the most significant events in Woolf's life, a life rich with significance, took place in 1918 when an aunt (whom she identifies as "Mary Beton" in A Room of One's Own) died and bequeathed her £500 a year. The money set her free, in ways that surprised her and that took her some time to properly grasp.

It took Austen seventeen years to complete Pride and Prejudice. The announced subject of Virginia Woolf's address at Girton was "Women & Literature," and she confronted the problems experienced by the Big Four (Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and George Eliot):

I thought, looking at the four famous names, what had George Eliot in common with Emily Brontë? Did not Charlotte Brontë fail entirely to understand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child, four more incongruous characters could not have met together in a room—so much so that it is tempting to invent a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange force they were all compelled when they wrote, to write novels. Had it something to do with being born of the middle class, I asked; and with the fact that the middle-class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them? If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain,—"women never have an half hour… that they can call their own"—she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. 'How she was able to effect all this', her nephew writes in his Memoir, 'is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party. Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People's feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels, even though, as seems evident enough, two of the four famous women here named were not by nature novelists. Emily Brontë should have written poetic plays; the overflow of George Eliot's capacious mind should have spread itself when the creative impulse was spent upon history or biography. They wrote novels, however; one may even go further, I said, taking Pride and Prejudice from the shelf, and say that they wrote good novels. Without boasting or giving pain to the opposite sex, one may say that Pride and Prejudice is a good book. At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely.

Knowing all this about the conditions in which Pride and Prejudice was written, some critics continue to take exception with Austen's subject, which is nothing more or less than the daily lives of "middle class" women, imposed from without by sexual and social circumstance. Stanley Kauffmann, in his reviews of the (mediocre) films made from Austen's novels Emma and Pride and Prejudice, felt duty bound to bring it up: "But the story! Jane, Jane, the story that you worked on for seventeen years! It was most pithily criticized by Emerson in his journals. He disliked Austen's novels for several reasons, but what bothered him most was their dominant theme: 'The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice, is marriageableness; all that interests in any character introduced is still this one, Has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming?' Critics innumerable have either scanted the matter that disturbed Emerson or, allowing it, have rhapsodized about Austen's prose and her perceptions of character.(1) ...Laud Austen's structure as it deserves, her acuteness about character, her wit; still, ultimately this is a story of young women whose sole serious occupation is finding agreeable husbands with money. Was Austen subtly castigating a society that so narrowed a woman's existence? In the late twentieth century we have to hope so: because without believing it, these novels seem pathetic, enraging and just a touch disgusting."(2)

I don't quite understand what is being criticized here. Austen was simply telling us about the lives of the people she knew, living in the world as they found it. How is Austen to blame for telling the truth? Virginia Woolf cuts through to the proper lesson that we should take away with us on reading Austen, the Brontës, and Eliot:

One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year—but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a novelist but upon those of her sex at that time. She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. One of them, it is true, George Eliot, escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secluded villa in St John's Wood. And there she settled down in the shadow of the world's disapproval. 'I wish it to be understood', she wrote, 'that I should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for the invitation'; for was she not living in sin with a married man and might not the sight of her damage the chastity of Mrs Smith or whoever it might be that chanced to call? One must submit to the social convention, and be 'cut off from what is called the world'. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gypsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady 'cut off from what is called the world', however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace.

What matters is the individual writer's ability to observe and to transform his or her observable world into ageless art.


(1) "Family Troubles," The New Republic, December 12, 2005.
(2) "Scotland Now, England Then," The New Republic, August 19, 1996.

Virginia Woolf

Besides her fictional writings, which continue to grow in the esteem of critics and scholars (and, one hopes, readers), Virginia Woolf was also a superb and prolific literary critic. At her death in 1941, her husband was left with dozens of uncollected essays and reviews, which he dutifully collected and published through his own Hogarth Press. Among them was a short review on Lewis Carroll that I found it irresistible to reproduce here. So here it is.


LEWIS CARROLL

The complete works of Lewis Carroll have been issued by the Nonesuch Press in a stout volume of 1293 pages. So there is no excuse -- Lewis Carroll ought once and for all to be complete. We ought to be able to grasp him whole and entire. But we fail -- once more we fail. We think we have caught Lewis Carroll; we look again and see an Oxford clergyman. We think we have caught the Rev. C. L. Dodgson - we look again and see a fairy elf. The book breaks in two in our hands. In order to cement it, we turn to the Life.

But the Rev C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible. He accepted every convention; he was prudish, pernickety, pious, and jocose. If Oxford dons in the nineteenth century had an essence he was that essence. He was so good that his sisters worshipped him; so pure that his nephew has nothing to say about him. It is just possible, he hints, that "a shadow of disappointment lay over Lewis Carroll's life". Mr. Dodgson at once denies the shadow. "My life," he says, "is free from all trial and trouble." But this untinted jelly contained within it a perfectly hard crystal. It contained childhood. And this is very strange, for childhood normally fades slowly. Wisps of childhood persist when the boy or girl is a grown man or woman. Childhood returns sometimes by day, more often at night. But it was not so with Lewis Carroll. For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it. And therefore as he grew older this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. He slipped through the grown-up world like a shadow, solidifying only on the beach at Eastbourne, with little girls whose frocks he pinned up with safety pins. But since childhood remained in him entire, he could do what no one else has ever been able to do -- he could return to that world; he could re-create it, so that we too become children again.

In order to make us into children, he first makes us asleep. "Down, down, down, would the fall never come to an end?" Down, down, down we fall into that terrifying, wildly inconsequent, yet perfectly logical world where time races, then stands still; where space stretches, then contracts. It is the world of sleep; it is also the world of dreams. Without any conscious effort dreams come; the white rabbit, the walrus, and the carpenter, one after another, turning and changing one into the other, they come skipping and leaping across the mind. It is for this reason that the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children. President Wilson, Queen Victoria, The Times leader writer, the late Lord Salisbury -- it does not matter how old, how important, or how insignificant you are, you become a child again. To become a child is to be very literal; to find everything so strange that nothing is surprising; to be heartless, to be ruthless, yet to be so passionate that a snub or a shadow drapes the world in gloom. It is to be Alice in Wonderland.

It is also to be Alice Through the Looking Glass. It is to see the world upside down. Many great satirists and moralists have shown us the world upside down, and have made us see it, as grown-up people see it, savagely. Only Lewis Carroll has shown us the world upside down as a child sees it, and has made us laugh as children laugh, irresponsibly. Down the groves of pure nonsense we whirl laughing, laughing --

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope . . .

And then we wake. None of the transitions in Alice in Wonderland is quite so queer. For we wake to find - is it the Rev. C. L. Dodgson? Is it Lewis Carroll? Or is it both combined? This conglomerate object intends to produce an extra-Bowdlerised edition of Shakespeare for the use of British maidens; implores them to think of death when they go to the play; and always, always to realise that "the true object of life is the development of character. . . ." Is there, then, even in 1293 pages, any such thing as "completeness"?


Written in January 1939.

Tango del Violador

Out of respect for languages I never learned, or didn't learn thoroughly enough, I usually avoid reading poetry in translation. Of course, I've read the classics in translation, and some of my favorite authors, like Chekhov, Camus, and Kawabata, I know only from translations. But it's prose. As Virginia Woolf explained, "to know a language one must have forgotten it, and that is a stage that one cannot reach without having absorbed words unconsciously as a child. In reading a language that is not one's own, consciousness is awake, and keeps us aware of the surface glitter of the words; but it never suffers them to sink into that region of the mind where old habits and instincts roll them round and shape them a body rather different from their faces."

Despite my ignorance of Spanish, however, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is one of my heroes. But you, dear reader, must know this if you've looked up this blog on a web search. "Widower's Tango" (Tango del Viudo) is the title of a Neruda poem that he included in his collection, Residence on Earth. I chose to name my blog after the poem for reasons that I described in a post on February 1, 2011. In 2001, I copied a page from the life of Neruda when I waited until my wife left our apartment at around 11 AM and watched her drive out of sight. Then I moved a van I had rented the day before to the bottom of the stairs, filled several empty boxes with all of my clothes, books, videos, cds - everything that I still considered to be mine - and carried them down to the van. When I was done, I taped a note to the screen of our big screen TV (far too heavy to carry down three flights of stairs), locked the front door, slid the key under it, and drove from Denver to Des Moines, Iowa without stopping. I hadn't told her I was leaving. The note said I had gone to San Diego. I left her in such a manner because I couldn't think of any other way to get away clean. 

Neruda found himself in a similarly impossible predicament with a Burmese woman he called Josie Bliss. I won't recount the whole story. It can be found in his Memoirs, first published (in Spanish) in 1974, and in English translation (by Hardie St. Martin) in 1977. Neruda was involved in the editing of the book when he died of cancer in 1972. The editing was completed and the book was published with the revelatory title, Confieso que he vivido: Memorias - "I confess that I lived".

And then everything I knew - or thought I knew - about Neruda was called into question when, the day after Thanksgiving, I read this headline from The Guardian: "Poet, hero, rapist – outrage over Chilean plan to rename airport after Neruda". It was the first time I'd heard anything about Neruda being a rapist. Doing a little digging, I learned that the accusation has been a hot potato since 2010, when Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian socialist provocateur, quoted a passage from Neruda's Memoirs as an example of liberal hypocrisy. In the book, the particular passage quoted by Žižek comes right after Neruda had been revisited by Josie Bliss in Ceylon and he had to pack her off back to Burma to keep her from being arrested and forcibly deported. Here is the entire passage that has caused all the latest controversy:

My solitary bungalow was far from any urban development. When I rented it, I tried to find out where the toilet was; I couldn't see it anywhere. Actually, it was nowhere near the shower, it was at the back of the house. I inspected it with curiosity. It was a wooden box with a hole in the middle, very much like the artifact I had known as a child in the Chilean countryside. But our toilets were set over a deep well or over running water. Here the receptacle was a simple metal pail under the round hole.

The pail was clean every morning, but I had no idea how its contents disappeared. One morning I rose earlier than usual, and I was amazed when I saw what had been happening.

Into the back of the house, walking like a dusky statue, came the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon, a Tamil of the pariah caste. She was wearing a red-and-gold sari of the cheapest kind of cloth. She had heavy bangles on her bare ankles. Two tiny red dots glittered on either side of her nose. They must have been ordinary glass, but on her they were rubies.

She walked solemnly toward the latrine, without so much as a side glance at me, not bothering to acknowledge my existence, and vanished with the disgusting receptacle on her head, moving away with the steps of a goddess.

She was so lovely that, regardless of her humble job, I couldn't get her off my mind. Like a shy jungle animal she belonged to another kind of existence, a different world. I called to her, but it was no use. After that, I sometimes put a gift in her path, a piece of silk or some fruit. She would go past without hearing or looking. That ignoble routine had been transformed by her dark beauty into the dutiful ceremony of an indifferent queen.

One morning, I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. Unsmiling, she let herself be led away and was soon naked in my bed. Her waist, so very slim, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts made her like one of the thousand-year-old sculptures from the south of India. It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive. She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated.


For me, the strangest thing about this story, which took place in 1929, is not Neruda's forthright confession of what he had done to the Tamil woman, or his evident contrition, but how it could've been in print for 36 years, in its original Spanish and in translations into several other languages, read by thousands of people, including critics and biographers, before anyone had a problem with it.

In my online search for articles using the keywords "Pablo Neruda rapist", I found one (one was enough) written by a journalist (1) who clearly made up a story about how she had just bought a bagful of Neruda books, along with the new biography of Neruda by Mark Eisner, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling, had read the incriminating passage from Neruda's Memoirs while riding the subway, and, after interviewing Eisner, who was fair enough to tell her "he was incredibly influential as a human being, and played such a historic role that included so many political events, and he’s so important for understanding social and artistic movements”, took all of her Neruda books off her shelf and threw them into a recycle bin.

But there is a passage in Neruda's Memoirs that comes just before the rape that provides some welcome context for his mistreatment of the Tamil woman:

Solitude in Colombo was not only dull but indolent. I had a few friends on the street where I lived. Girls of various colorings visited my campaign cot, leaving no record but the lightning spasm of the flesh. My body was a lonely bonfire burning night and day on that tropical coast. One friend, Patsy, showed up frequently with some of her friends, dusky and golden, girls of Boer, English, Dravidian blood. They went to bed with me sportingly, asking for nothing in return.

One of them told me all about her visits to the "chummeries." That's what they called the bungalows where young Englishmen, clerks in shops or firms, lived together in groups to save on money and food. Without a trace of cynicism in her voice, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the girl told me that she had once had sex with fourteen of them.

"And why did you do it?" I asked her.

"They were having a party one night and I was alone with them. They turned on a gramophone, I danced a few steps with each of them, and as we danced, we'd lose our way into one bedroom or another. That way, everyone was happy."

She was not a prostitute. No, she was just another product of colonialism, a candid and generous fruit off its tree. Her story impressed me, and from then on, I had a soft spot for her in my heart.

Neruda was a lifelong communist, but his observations in Burma and Ceylon, both British colonies, were somewhat disingenuous, and his intimacy with the "downtrodden" native people was more than a little patronizing, especially from a young man in a position of authority. To Neruda, and to the reader decades later, it was a different world in a different time. In Burma, Neruda had a native lover. His relations with her were initially purely physical. But the woman's possessiveness and jealousy soon became intolerable. He was trapped with her until he received orders that he was transferred to Ceylon. He saw his opportunity to leave the woman, abandoning almost everything to keep her from suspecting, and went off to board the ship just like he was going to work. Were there sexual and racial aspects to his relations with the women he encountered in the East? Of course there were - since he was from the other side of the world and didn't speak their languages. Yes, it is significant that the beautiful Tamil woman was a pariah caste and that she was already familiar with Neruda's shit. She may have been "untouchable" but she was still eminently desirable. It was perhaps her very low social status that made her even more fascinating to Neruda. If she had somehow testified her own case to us, if we had known anything more of her than Neruda gave us in his confieso, perhaps it would be different. But Mark Eisner suggests that even Josie Bliss may have been a fictitious person. As far as we can tell, was there ever a beautuful Tamil woman whom Neruda ravaged?

I am tentatively (perhaps selectively) in favor of the #MeToo movement, giving credence to voices that were formerly and historically silenced. I hoped that enough people would take it seriously to block the recent Supreme Court justice nomination. But we aren't there yet. If any formerly avid reader of Neruda can use the sketchy anecdote from his youth as enough of a reason to reject his life's work, they probably weren't serious about him in the first place. I think there is a dividing line between a person's life and their work. I won't excuse or forgive what Neruda did - and confessed to having done. I don't consider it my place to do either. Does it change the way I think of Neruda, or lessen my consideration of his work? As I said before, I don't - can't - properly judge the quality of his poetry. But the chilling first words of "Tango del viudo" still thrill through me --

Ah maligna ...

And, for the record, I won't be changing the name of this blog any time soon, and they probably won't be changing the name of Santiago's airport.  


(1) Joshunda Sanders.