Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life
By Adam Feinstein
Bloomsbury, 2004
497 pages, $65 (hb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

Pablo Neruda was a poet who won the Nobel prize for literature. He was also a lifelong, if increasingly troubled, Stalinist. As Adam Feinstein’s biography of the Chilean poet shows, Neruda’s complex soul harboured incompatible spirits.

Born in 1904, the young Neftali Basoalto’s interest in books, poetry and nature displeased his hostile father and, in a search for independence, he took the name Pablo Neruda, poet and bohemian aesthete. His first published book contained 48 poems on love, eroticism and loneliness, and, during a time of political upheaval in Chile when reactionary governments were crushing student, union and communist movements, none were political. His poetry of this period, Neruda was later to reflect, had a content “soaked in atrocious pessimism and anguish — they do not help you to live, but to die”. The Spanish Civil War was to change all that.

Sent to Spain in 1934 in the latest in a series of government diplomatic postings, Neruda was late to commit to the left, a result of needing to tread softly as a representative of the pro-Franco Chilean government. It was the fascist execution of the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca that tipped the scales. “Spain in My Heart”, Neruda’s heart-wrenching hymn to the victims of the fascists in Spain, announced his arrival as a political poet in 1936. This period, however, also marked Neruda, as with many other left-wing and anti-fascist artists, as not knowing, or not wanting to know, about what Stalin was doing in the name of the socialism Neruda embraced.

Back in Chile, Neruda collected funds for the defence of the Spanish Republic and was due to address a porters’ union in Santiago’s central market one evening in 1937. Neruda froze with stage fright and desperately resorted to reading his poetry. Greeted by “stony, Chilean silence”, he waited tensely for their verdict and in what he described as “the most important event in my literary career”, one man, possibly the union leader, said “Comrade Pablo, we are totally forgotten people. And I can tell you that we have never been so totally moved ...”, before breaking down in tears.

From then on, says Feinstein, Neruda “abandoned any desire for obscurity and complexity” in his poetry. From that moment, he “wanted to reach out to ordinary people and touch them as profoundly as he had in that Santiago market. Anything he wrote after that, he wrote for them”, not for intellectuals and bohemians. The “anguished self-obsession” of his protracted adolescence was decisively over.

Posted to Paris during the second world war by a new left-wing Popular Front government in Chile, Neruda rescued 2000 Republican Spanish Civil War refugees, stranded in France, loading them on an old fishing boat to Chile, whilst also making the Paris embassy of Chile (Chile was officially neutral during the war), a haven for European anti-Nazi refugees.

Neruda’s political reputation became tarnished, however, when posted to Mexico, where he was unjustly accused of complicity in an attempt to assassinate Leon Trotsky. In 1940, David Siqueiros, a Mexican mural wall-painter and hard-line Stalinist, had led a gang on an assassination attempt against Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary leader and anti-Stalinist exile. Stalin had pressured the Mexican president to grant Siqueiros a visa to Chile rather than arrest him, and Neruda was ordered to comply or face expulsion. Neruda’s acquiescence in spiriting Siqueiros to safety may have been facilitated by Neruda’s rosy-eyed view of Stalin but the right-wing allegation that Neruda was personally involved in the assassination plot was slander.

After the war, Neruda was chosen by Chile’s Communist Party as a Popular Front candidate for the 1945 elections. Neruda’s campaigning among the copper and nitrate miners and the drought-tormented peasants in the arid north of Chile stiffened his political resolve. Neruda was elected to the Senate and he joined the Communist Party, of which he said (in his poem “To My Party”) — “you have given me brotherhood towards the man I do not know”.

When the narrowly elected Popular Front government fractured under the pressure of the Cold War, there was violent repression of the left. Neruda’s house was set on fire and his senator status (and immunity to arrest) was revoked, forcing him into hiding before a hair-raising escape by horseback across the Andes to Argentina.

An exile in Europe, Neruda’s loyalty to Stalin remained untouched by the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union. Neruda was blinded to the sinister by Russia’s very real heroic sacrifice in turning back Hitler and the very false image of Stalin as the conqueror of Nazism. Neruda’s Stalinism survived the double shock of 1956 — Kruschev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes followed by Kruschev’s invasion of Hungary, on both of which a privately troubled Neruda remained publicly silent.

Neruda refused to openly concede any demerit points against Soviet-style Stalinism, partly justifying his silence as a case of not giving ammunition to the enemies of the left by joining in their anti-Soviet chorus. When Moscow banned Boris Pasternak from receiving the 1958 Nobel prize for literature in Stockholm, Neruda, initially delighted at the award (despite his view that Pasternak, whose poetic talent he greatly admired, had the “reactionary politics of an enlightened deacon”) swallowed the Moscow line in uncomfortable silence.

“I believe it is my duty not to contribute ... to fuelling the Cold War”, he wrote of his tactical, but deplorable, silence on the persecution of dissident Soviet writers. The irony was that the public silence on Stalinism by Neruda (a member of the central committee of the Chilean Communist Party) gave the anti-socialist right the very political ammunition he had sought to deny them.

During a visit by Neruda to the US in 1966, his friend and admirer, the US playwright Arthur Miller, commented that “he felt baffled more than ever how a man of such all-embracing spirit could continue to countenance Stalinism”, concluding that “the depth of alienation from bourgeois society had locked a man into a misconceived, nearly religious loyalty to the dream Russia of the believing thirties”. When Neruda’s art and socialism were refracted through the prism of Stalinism, the result was poor poetry and poor politics.

After the CIA-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom had scuttled Neruda’s favouritism for the Nobel prize in 1964, by pouncing on his see-no-Stalinist-evil stance and by recycling the old smear about Neruda’s involvement in the plot to kill Trotsky, poetic justice was at last done when Neruda won the award in 1971. This was to be, however, a false harbinger of Neruda’s artistic, political and personal spring.

When the Socialist Party’s Salvador Allende (who could recite Neruda’s poems by heart) was elected President of Chile in 1970, Neruda was appointed ambassador to France from where he defended Allende’s policies of nationalisation of key industries that produced a million dollars a day for their US capitalist owners. “Why be scared”, wrote Neruda, “if we try to clothe our people, build hospitals, schools, roads, with those million dollars a day.” Neruda’s fears for the fate of the Allende government, however, plus his fraying Stalinism, and encroaching age and the prostate cancer it brought with it, gave Neruda’s later poetry a “defeated air of sadness”, although still full of lyrical, if melancholy, beauty.

By 1973, Neruda was frail and dying, as was the Allende government. Twelve days after General Pinochet’s CIA-sponsored coup on September 11, Neruda died. True to his belief that “poetry is rebellion”, however, Neruda’s funeral cortege became a massive, illegal, demonstration of workers and students, the first since the coup. In the face of terrifying armed soldiers, the funeral marchers, singing the “Internationale”, lost their fear and started back on the road to resistance. As in life, so too in death, Neruda was the poet of the poor and abused.

From Green Left Weekly, June 29, 2005.
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