Pablo Neruda Revisited: Benjamin Kunkel Examines Neruda's Early Life
In an article recently published at the New Republic, Benjamin Kunkel reveals elements of Pablo Neruda's adolescence that are similar to the proclivities of young poets today: his tendency to wear all black, his shy demeanor, and his bookishness. Although baptized Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, he adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda as a teen. In Kunkel's words, "Neruda as an adolescent poet amounted almost to a parody of the type, worryingly thin, melancholy and shy, and got up, unlike other local boys, all in black." It was not without pushback from his father: "Among the men who didn’t recognize his promise was the poet’s own father, a former dockworker with a hard demeanor." From there:
Following the death of Neftalí’s mother mere weeks after the birth of her son, he’d installed the family in the frontier town of Temuco, halfway down the racked spine of Chile, where as the conductor of a “ballast train” he oversaw a crew of laborers continuously pouring gravel over the railroad to keep the tracks from being washed away by violent weather.
His father became so concerned that his son would learn no useful trade that he one day hurled the boy’s bookcase and papers out the window, then set them alight on the patio below. Neruda invented his pen name with the aim, he recalled some 50 years later in his Memoirs, of throwing his father “off the scent” of his published poems. Soon after the 17-year-old Neftalí Reyes enrolled at the University of Chile in Santiago, relying on his father for his meager living expenses and neglecting his studies in French pedagogy, one Pablo Neruda began to attract the notice of fellow students as a talented poet. Exotic but easy to pronounce, his adopted Czech surname became that of the preeminent twentieth-century poet in Spanish, a language whose poetry had quite a century.
Neruda said the ordeals of the era invited the poets’ breakthrough. “It has been the privilege of our time—with its wars, revolutions, and tremendous social upheavals—to cultivate more ground for poetry than anyone ever imagined. The common man has had to confront it, attacking or attacked, in solitude or with an enormous mass of people at public rallies.” A more sociological way of framing the idea would be to say that, because mass literacy and education formed a basic aspect of mass politics, poets during the middle half of the twentieth century could both come from humble backgrounds as never before and find an audience among ordinary people as never before. Neruda’s own case seemed to particularly confirm the general observation: Raised in “country-boy, petit-bourgeois” circumstances, “the people’s poet,” as he called himself, could in the decades after World War II fill stadiums and union halls, reciting to mass gatherings poems about the masses’ common pleasures and collective struggle. “A poet who reads his poems to 130,000 people,” he wrote about an occasion in São Paulo, “is not the same man and cannot keep writing in the same way.”
Read the whole story at the New Republic.