Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (10 page)

Neruda, the son of a railroad worker, published his first poem at thirteen. He was only sixteen — an age when many of us are barely growing out of short pants — when he decided that the name he was born with (Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto) would not do for him. He chose, instead, to rename himself Pablo (a simple Spanish name already being made famous by the great painter Picasso) Neruda (after the Czech writer Jan Neruda, whom he greatly admired). Within four years he had already published a book of poetry that stunned the world:
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
Eight decades of lovers since then have romanced each other with lines written by a twenty-year-old. Twenty-nine more volumes were to follow, though Pablo Neruda entered his country's diplomatic service (poetry has never been a generous paymaster). From love, to an evocative humanism in
Residence on Earth
(1933), through the powerful and deceptively simple
Elementary Odes
(1958),
Neruda sparkled with a brilliance that was both fierce and memorable.

He was, it must be said, a writer “engagé.” His politics was not merely leftist; he was a committed Communist and — though it seems awkward to admit it today, after all we know of the Soviet strongman's cruelties — avowedly Stalinist. His political convictions were really forged (like those of so many others at that time) in the crucible of the Spanish Civil War. Neruda had, after minor consular posts in Asia and Argentina, been assigned to Spain in 1934, just as tensions between the Republicans and the Fascists were beginning to reach boiling point. His postings in places like Colombo and Rangoon had already awakened his consciousness of the perverse iniquities of colonialism, and he had even been boycotted by British society in Burma for his heretical views. (“The boycott,” he wrote, “couldn't have pleased me more. Those intolerant Europeans were not really interesting…. I had not come to the Orient to spend my life with transient colonizers but with the ancient spirit of that world.”) When his friend, the great Spanish poet Federico Lorca, was murdered by the Fascists in August 1936, Neruda crossed the Rubicon. Not only did he write his classic poem about the war, “Spain in My Heart,” but he intervened to save the lives of some two thousand leftist refugees by transporting them by sea to Chile. Neruda's official role in the evacuation as a diplomat was matched by his passionate self-justification in his poetry. In a powerful poem, “Let Me Explain a Few Things,” Neruda traced his own change from the romantic who had authored love poems to the committed righter of the world's wrongs: “You
will ask why his poetry / does not speak of dreams and leaves?” he wrote. And then he provided the ringing answer: “Come and see the blood in the streets / Come and see the blood in the streets!”

Diplomacy was clearly not going to be enough for someone with such a seething passion for justice, and Neruda resigned his diplomatic position as Chilean consul-general in Mexico City in 1940. He delighted in returning home. “I believe a man should live in his own country,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I think the deracination of human beings leads to frustration in one way or another, obstructing the light of the soul.” Having given up diplomacy he entered politics, being elected as a senator in 1945, the year he also formally joined the Communist Party. Even those of us who see little to commend in communism as an ideology or the Communist Party as an institution cannot fail to be moved by the direct simplicity of his poem “To My Party.” Far from the jargon-laden propaganda of the usual Marxist tracts, Neruda's poem soars in its vision: “You have given me brotherhood towards the man I do not know./You have given me the added strength of all those living…. / You showed me how one person's pain could die in the victory of all…./ You have made me indestructible, for I no longer end in myself.” Through Neruda's magnificent words, it is easier to understand how so many young idealists at the time found inspiration in Communist solidarity.

A clash with Chile's tyrannical rulers was inevitable. After a passionate denunciation of the government in a Venezuelan newspaper (no Chilean paper was prepared to publish it) was followed by a courageous speech in the Senate
accusing the authorities of running a concentration camp, Neruda was forced to go into hiding in 1948. He lived underground, protected by friends, for a year before fleeing Chile in disguise in a bold horseback ride across the mountains to Argentina, during which he nearly perished. He made it after a couple of harrowing episodes, carrying with him a precious manuscript of poems,
Canto General.
There followed three years of exile in Europe (part of which was recently immortalized in the marvelous Italian film
The Postman,
though it omitted his once having to escape arrest by fleeing on a gondola in Venice).

On his return to Chile, Neruda remained active politically and was even nominated for the presidency of his country. He stepped aside for his friend Salvador Allende, who was finally elected in 1970 and named Neruda his ambassador to France. Ill health prompted the poet-diplomat to return home in late 1972. It was there that Neruda followed in anguish the coup that toppled Allende's government. As a prominent Communist, Neruda was raided by the military on his deathbed, but was spirited enough to say to the commander who marched into his bedroom: “There is only one thing of danger for you here — my poetry!”

Twelve days after the fall of the Allende government, Pablo Neruda died. His body lay for two days in his house, which had been ransacked by soldiers, and his funeral became the occasion for perhaps the only spontaneous popular demonstration against the military dictatorship. In his memorable poem “The Heights of Machu Picchu” he had written of the permanence of that durable Inca rock fortress (“the rock that abides, and the word”), but now it would be
of Neruda himself that the next lines spoke: “death's plenitude holding us here, a bastion, the fullness / of life like a blow falling.” In his poem “The Poet's Obligation” Neruda had declared: “To whoever is not listening to the sea / this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up / in house or office, factory or woman / or street or mine or dry prison cell,/to him I come, and without speaking or looking / I arrive and open the door of his prison.”

Those prison doors will always remain open to anyone who can pick up a volume of Neruda's. His biographer Adam Feinstein recounts how one morning soon after his death there was an uproar in a house where Neruda had used to live — a huge eagle had gotten into the living room, though all the doors and windows of the house had been locked for months. Pablo Neruda had always said that in his next life he wanted to be an eagle. No doubt his wish was fulfilled, and he soars above us today, like his poetry.

O
NE MUST NEVER SPEAK ILL OF THE DEAD
, of course, though it is tempting to wonder whether that old dictum applies to those who themselves, while they were alive, reveled in speaking ill of both the dead and the living. Still, now that the eulogies for the late Nirad Chaudhuri, who died in 1999, have been heard and read and no doubt filed away, only to be exhumed at the next unsuitable opportunity, one wonders whether the traditional kindness to the departed soul colored rather too much of our judgment.

From the publication of his
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
shortly after Independence through a series of disquisitions on his native India and the Britain to which he emigrated, Nirad Chaudhuri acquired a formidable reputation as a stylist and a contrarian. In books with arch titles like
Thy Hand, Great Anarch!
Chaudhuri placed his considerable erudition and florid English at the service of a worldview that combined personal introspection with ethnic self-hatred. It did not help that, though he was born in 1897, his political
sensibilities seemed grounded in the nineteenth century; certainly his education, whether formal or self-taught, appears to have taken little account of ideas elaborated since then. British critics found in him an Indian they could agree with, and painlessly admire; the Indians who frothed at the mouth at his reactionary views were dismissed by Chaudhuri with the contempt that he reserved for most of his compatriots.

The conventional wisdom — at least as reflected in the generous sampling of elegiac obituaries I read — is that Nirad-babu, as he was known in the Bengali fashion, was a great writer and a magnificent intellect, a highly civilized and elegant prosodist unfairly excoriated by Indians who had not read what they criticized. Some obituarists delighted in quoting the old curmudgeon's notorious dedication in
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian:
“To the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge:
Civis Brittanicus Sum,
because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule.” Most went on to say that outraged Indians did not read much more than the dedication; others pointed out, with a somewhat superior air, that the dedication was not the un-critical piece of British flattery it appeared to be, since, after all, it upbraided the Raj for denying British citizenship to Indians. Both sets of writers appeared to think that Indians who objected to Nirad-babu's autobiography were merely hypersensitive nationalists without the intelligence or discernment to know any better.

I beg to differ. However generously one reads that appalling dedication, there is no escaping the unedifying spectacle of a brown man with his nose up the colonial fundament. “All that was good and living within us” — all, mind you, not some — “was made, shaped and quickened” by British rule? The mind boggles at the thought of Nirad Chaudhuri's omissions, both of the millennial Indian civilizational and intellectual heritage, and of the exactions and injustices of British colonial rule. Any author who can put such a thought into the dedication of his first book is not merely being polemical; he is advertising his allegiances, and deserves to be taken at his own xenolatrous word.

Chaudhuri was the first Indian writer of any distinction to tap into the vein of an Indian national weakness — Indians’ readiness, as a people, to lap up critical judgments about ourselves, especially if they have first been published abroad. I remember, as a child in the late 1960s, my mounting horror and indignation at reading an article by Niradbabu in the
Illustrated Weekly of India
entitled “Why I Hate Indians.” Sure enough, it elicited a flurry of rejoinders that the editor, the puckish Khushwant Singh, published under the heading “Why I Hate Nirad Chaudhuri.” But even then I wondered why the arrogant pedantry of the man, his sweeping generalizations and apocalyptic conclusions, usually unsupported by any empirical evidence, were taken so seriously by readers and editors.

Of course Nirad Chaudhuri was a man of learning and refinement. Of course he could quote Greek and Latin and drop classical allusions in a manner that went out of style with the solar topee. Of course he could write with elegance
and erudition — though all too often his orotund sentences were weighed down by the turgidity of his vocabulary. Of course he was a literary original, in a way that was uniquely his own. But after granting all that, it is also true that he was a crotchety eccentric whose delight in his own iconoclasm showed little respect for the qualities and attainments of others. Nirad-babu was an Indian whose greatest satisfaction in his prospective bride lay in her ability to spell “Beethoven”; an Indian who thought more highly of Winston Churchill than he did of Mahatma Gandhi or Pandit Nehru. It was typical that his take-no-prisoners assault on all the citadels of Indian culture and civilization was titled
The Continent of Circe:
he had to turn to Western mythology even for his principal metaphor.
Civis Brittanicus Sum
indeed: no doubt woggishness loses something in the translation.

There is a great deal of truth in the indulgent suggestion by the American historian David Lelyveld that “Nirad Chaudhuri is a fiction created by the Indian writer of the same name — a bizarre, outrageous and magical transformation of that stock character of imperialist literature, the Bengali babu.” The problem is that the caricatured babu was not transformed enough. While the British laughed at the breed for their half-successful attempts to emulate their English masters, Nirad-babu sought to demonstrate that his success was impossible to laugh at. In 1835, that archimperialist Lord Macaulay had envisaged the creation of an intermediate class of Indians, educated in English, to serve and support British rule: they would be “a class of persons Indian in blood and color but English in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Not only did Nirad Chaudhuri teach himself to
become the perfect English gentleman in terms of his intellect, tastes, and pro-imperial opinions (carrying the Macaulayan fantasy to its absurd extreme), but he went one better than most Englishmen, scattering phrases in French, German, and Italian through his writing.

Nirad-babu moved to England for good in 1970, but in his mind he had always lived there. Yet his writing itself evoked the Bengali babu's obsession with his lofty heritage, and his petulance at the failure of the white man to recognize and reward it. That there might be something faintly comical about the sight of this wizened figure, in his immaculate Bengali dhoti, strutting about Oxford lamenting the decline of British civilization does not seem to have occurred to his admirers. But then comedy is not what one thinks about at the crematorium.

W
HEN THE NEWS BROKE IN
2001 of the ending of India's most distinguished literary career of the twentieth century, that of Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Narayanaswami (contracted, at Graham Greene's suggestion, to R. K. Narayan), who had passed away at ninety-two, I immediately received a number of calls from journalists and editors, mainly in the United States, who were hastily penning appreciations of the veteran writer. In every case, they asked for a contribution, a few lines, or at least a quote; in every case, I demurred. Death is a moment for regret, for retrospection and remembered affection, but I had little admiration to offer. At the same time, only once had I allowed the news of a writer's death to prompt me to pour vitriol onto his pyre, and that was when the Indophobic Nirad Chaudhuri went to his Elysian fields. I certainly did not feel so negatively about Narayan. Better to say nothing, I decided, when you have nothing much to say.